Our initial plan was to drive to Italian Village in Chicago to eat dinner and then to drive north to where the concert was playing. Lyle had been to this venue before and thought it would be no problem to park on the street. He has never been so wrong. Luckily we figured it out before we left. As soon as I printed off the map that Lyle had pulled from Google, the first thing I noticed was that Wrigley Field was right down the street from the club. A quick check of the MLB website showed that game 3 of the playoffs was due to start there at 5pm (central time), our concert was starting at 7pm but we were supposed to leave early to go to dinner. So we quickly altered our plans so that we would park by the restaurant (far from any baseball) and then take a cab or the subway to the venue. All was going well, we got into a garage just down the street from my favorite restaurant, Italian Village. Unfortunatley, the ballgame was not the only thing going on in Chicago last night, there were also a few plays and every person heading to a play was also planning to eat at my favorite restaurant. The nerve. The line was down the stairs and out the door. Lyle pushed his way to the top and found out there was an hour wait. Too long. Unfortunately, we did not have an alternative plan. So we hopped in a cab and headed to the venue to see if there was any place to eat around there. There were plenty of cabs since the game had already started and anybody with tickets was already there. What we found out when we got there though is that everybody without tickets was also there. They were just crowded, shoulder to sweaty disgusting shoulder, in every bar on the street. And there were a lot of bars on the street. We walked a little way until we found an italian place with a bar on one side and a restaurant on the other. The bar was packed because there were 6 TVs, the restaurant was not since there were 0 TVs. At this point we were about 4 doors down from our concert venue and right across the street from Wrigley. Lyle took this shot right outside the front door of the restaurant.
As you can see just above cell-phone-man's head we could see right into the bleachers of the stadium it was kind of surreal. Anyway, we had a very nice dinner (it wasn't even too noisy since the Cubs apparently weren't doing anything) and when we were done we walked a little bit before heading into the concert. We walked toward the stadium and I was having a hard time placing what I was seeing. It looked like bleachers were set up outside the stadium. They were across the street and off to the side. What kind of cheap, crappy seats are these. As we got closer we noticed that they were indeed bleachers, but they were on top of apartment buildings across the street from the stadium. It was one of the strangest things I have ever seen. We did not walk all the way down the street, but each building had a similiar set up. I wonder how much they charged?
When we left for the club the score was 3-1 (Arizona, of course). After the warm-up band (
Grand Buffet--cute, but not great) we checked in with Jonathan (around 8:30pm) and the score was 5-1 and it was bottom of the 9th, so barring a miracle the Cubs were going to lose the playoffs. Hmmm. Glad we were going to miss all of that. About an hour and a half later our concert was all done and we headed outside to catch a cab back to our car. HA!! Even though the game let out more than an hour before the streets and the bars were extremely crowded and hundreds of people were looking for a cab. We wasted about a half hour searching for a cab before we headed for the subway. Neither of us had ever rode the subway in Chicago, but how hard could it be. Well, to start there were still 6 million people wanting to ride the subway and there was only one subway card machine working. So we got in line. There was a Transit worker at the front of the line helping people since the machine was very fussy about the dollar bills (we have all been there). Finally, when we were only about 10 people to the front this worker got so frustrated she said nevermind and she just opened up the gates. Just get on the train! So we crammed shoulder to sweaty disgusting shoulder onto the train with everyone else and found our way back to our car. Getting out of the city once we had our car was tough too, but it was tough with air conditioning and my own private space so it was managable.
All in all, we had an excellent adventure. The concert was fun and being in the crowds was fun. There was certainly no shortage of drunk people on the streets of Chicago last night but no one was overly obnoxious and no one (that I know of) got hurt.
