Promoting Chicago as a global cultural destination
Happy Monday! If you are an Illinois resident, you can enjoy free admission to some of Chicago’s best museums. Click on the link below for a list of the museums offering this deal.
Chicago’s Museum Favorites Free This Week | The Local Tourist Chicago.
Merry Christmas everybody! Are you looking for ideas on how to spend this day in Chicago? Most places are closed, but here are some suggestions on what to do in the city:
Go Ice Skating at the McCormick Tribune Ice Rink in Millennium Park
The rink, now in its eleventh season, draws more than 100,000 skaters annually and is free and open to the public. Skate rental is available for $10. The ice rink is located on Michigan Avenue between Washington and Madison streets. Today, the rink will be open today from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
See Christmas Lights at The Magnificent Mile Lights Festival
The festival continues along North Michigan Avenue. Call (312) 642-3570 for more information or visit www.themagnificentmile.com.
Visit the Lincoln Park Conservatory
The Conservatory has a Winter Flower and Train Show going on. The hours of operation today are from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Call (312) 742-7736 for more information visit http://www.chicagoparkdistrict.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/parks.detail/object_id/45aa3ed2-7c6f-4461-83b2-29cb991637e6.cfm
Watch the Bears vs Packers game at a bar
Go to Dublin’s and/or The Hunt Club on State St and Maple (at Mariano Park) for the game and a nosh on Christmas day. There is also a list of other bars that are open for Christmas Day at this link: http://nowyouknowevents.com/2011/12/24/christmas-day-watch-the-bears-vs-packers-game/
Have you ever taken a food tasting tour? If you want to try a great one, I would highly recommend taking it with the guys from Chicago Food Planet. This is a tour company that offers walking food tours in different areas of the city. I had the pleasure to join them in a 3-hour culinary journey through the Bucktown and Wicker Park neighborhoods. The selection of the restaurants for the tour is based on the quality, history, originality, and awards that the restaurant holds.
For this tour in particular, we visited George’s Hot Dogs, a traditional hot dog stand established in 1948 that offers Chicago-style hot dogs prepared with fresh, high-quality ingredients. Then we headed to Hot Chocolate, a restaurant and dessert bar whose owner and chef won the Jean Banchet award for Best Celebrity Pastry Chef in Chicago and was named Pastry Chef of the Year by Chicago Magazine. There we tasted a super yummy iced chocolate and marshmallow. Our next stop was The Goddess and Grocer, a gourmet foods & catering store that carries products from around the world and where you can order deli sandwiches and salads. We had to walk a little bit more to get to Piece, a pizzeria and brewery place, but it was well worth it. Piece has award-winning micro-brewed beers, and one of the best pizzas I have ever tried (and I am not a pizza lover). They call it New Haven thin-crust pizza. This is a perfect place to watch a sports event: Piece has a series of eleven 42” plasma TVs that span the length of the bar. Our last stops were Sultan’s Market, a Middle-Eastern Deli/Store that offers delicious vegan and vegetarian food, and ICream Cafe , an ice cream parlor that makes customized molecular ice cream, frozen yogurt or sorbet on the spot. In each of these places, you get to taste a sample of their food ,which were absolutely delicious.
The tour was leaded by Liz, a graceful and knowledgeable tour guide who provided us with insightful commentaries, historical facts, and anecdotes of the restaurants we were visiting as well as of the neighborhoods we were walking through. I recommend taking this tour not only to tourists but also to locals. You will surely have a great time discovering culinary treasures in our city and learning interesting facts about the neighborhoods you are visiting.
Summer is now in full swing in Chicago and there are many world music and dance activities going on in the city. My pick for this weekend is the Chicago Folk and Roots Festival. This festival is a two-day celebration organized by the Old Town School of Folk Music, an institution committed to teach and celebrate music and cultural expressions rooted in the tradition of diverse American and global communities. The festival attracts 30,000 people for a spectacular array of music and dance performances from around the world. The festival also offers dance workshops, children’s activities, food, drink, and retail vendors. This year, I will have the pleasure to participate in this great celebration as a dancer with Peruvian Folk Dance Center. If you are interested in seeing this performance, come by 3:30 pm today. There is a $10 donation to get in the festival ($5 for seniors, 65 and over, and $5 for kids). For more information about other performances and dance workshops, go to http://www.chicagofolkandroots.org/. Hope to see you there!
I have to share with you an amazing world music experience that I had last night. Coincidentally, it happened during the severe thunderstorm that affected Chicago (for some reason, the best Summer memories that I have of this beautiful city have always happened under the rain). I went to see Brazilian musician Diogo Nogueira at the Music Without Borders series at Millenium Park. The Music Without Borders is a series of free outdoor concerts that explore music from cultures spanning the entire globe. The music was great and Diogo was able to connect with the audience really well, but what I most enjoyed about last night was the spirit of the people who attended the event. Many of them were familiar faces, locals from different parts of the world that love Brazilian music as well as musicians and dancers that tend to frequent Barra N on Tuesday nights. Despite the bad weather, we managed to have a fabulous time. We were dancing and cheering for Chicago even at the worst moment of the storm, when wind gusts were reaching 81 mph. Chicago definitely has the coolest people in the world! Here is a visual report of what happened last night. And if you have not experienced going to a Music Without Borders concert, I highly recommend you doing it. Gather some friends, bring a picnic blanket and some food, sit on the grass, and enjoy the performances of some incredible world musicians at one of the most beautiful places that we have here.
Yasas Urbanites!
Did you know that Chicago currently has the third largest Greek population of any city in the world? Maybe that is the reason why there are so many Greek festivals going on during the Summer. My favorite thing about these festivals is the circle or communal dances in which perfect strangers (Greeks and non-Greeks) get together and dance to the music of a live Greek Folk band. I have done this many times and have always had a great time. I also love to see single dancers do the Zeibekiko, which consists of a man or a woman dancing in the middle of a circle of friends who are on their knees clapping to the rhythm of the music. Here is a video showing you some Zeibekiko moves danced to the music of my favorite Zeibekiko song:
If you would like to try this on your own, then go to one of the festivals going on in the city this Summer. Something to keep in mind is that if you are coming to these festivals to eat, try to get there early because it gets quite crowded after 6 pm and some fests have run out of food in the past. Here is a list of them:
June 17-19: Lincoln Park Greek Fest
http://www.lincolnparkgreekfest.com/
June-September: List of Greek Orthodox Church Festivals in the metropolis of Chicago
http://chicago.goarch.org/festivals-metropolis
August 27-28: Chicago Greek Town Taste of Greece
While President Obama is visiting Puerto Rico (who, by the way, is the the first sitting U.S. president to visit Puerto Rico in 50 years), the Puerto Ricans living in Chicago already started their Patron Saint festivities in the Humboldt Park neighborhood today. According to the Puerto Rican Parade Committee, this six-day festival is the largest Latin Music Festival in the Midwest. “Humboldt Park is Chicago’s area’s historic Puerto Rican center and home to the city’s third-largest concentration of Puerto Ricans. About 113,000 Chicago residents claim Puerto Rican descent, second only to New York” reports the Chicago Tribune.
Salsa and Bomba lovers will have the chance to dance to the music of many of the local bands and others such as Herman Olivera (ex-singer of Eddie Palmieri’s Orchestra) and two-time Grammy Award winners Spanish Harlem Orchestra. For a detailed schedule and a list of the musicians performing at this festival, click here. If you want to attend the parade on June 18, go to downtown Chicago at 12 noon, by Columbus Dr. & Balbo Dr. And If you decide to go to Humboldt Park after that, I would recommend going to Coco’s restaurant on 2723 West Division Street and try their Coconut martini. It may be too sweet for some, but for me it is just delicious! Do any of you have any other recommendations for things to do in Humboldt Park?
Then you should talk to Margaret Hicks from Chicago Elevated. My friend Stephen Reginald from the South Loop Connection blog highly recommends her. He took her red light district tour (who knew there was a red light district here?) and liked it so much that he decided to write a post about it. Here is the link to his post about his experience with Chicago Elevated tours: http://southloopconnection.blogspot.com/2011/06/chicago-elevated-chicago-history-with.html. By the way, anyone living in the South Loop should check Stephen’s blog. He does a very good job at promoting this community and the businesses in the area.
….at the Andersonville Midsommarfest. This is an annual Summer festival located in the Andersonville neighborhood on Clark Street , between Foster and Catalpa, in which vendors from around the region sell their wares to passers-by while ethnic dance troupes and cutting-edge bands keep the party going. There is a significant number of Middle-Eastern businesses in this neighborhood, as well as a new influx of families with children, and a large lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans-gender population. I came to the Festival to see the local Brazilian band Chicago Samba perform. They gave a very entertaining show thanks to the dancers dressed in colorful and flashy outfits, but they paled in comparison to the outfit of this passer-by:
I took this picture during the performance of the 80s music band 16 Candles (who were a great discovery for me. Except for a few songs, their music selection and rendition was very engaging). Andersonville Midsommarfest is a definitely a good option to see great local bands perform and for seeing interesting outfits and beautiful men (who, unfortunately for me, happen to be gay. My friend said that she had never seen so many beautiful men in one place). By the way, this reminds me that I have to mark my calendar for the Chicago Gay Pride Parade on Sunday June 26 . I attended this parade a few years ago and had a great time. Let the fun begin: Summer in Chicago is just starting!
…one may find pretty interesting sites. Can any of you guess where I took this picture and what it means?
This graffiti of Charlie Chaplin marks a landmark from the silent movie era: the studios for the Essanay Film Manufacturing Company that operated in Chicago during the early part of the 20th century. It is best known today for its series of Charlie Chaplin comedies of 1915. The studios were located at 1345 W. Argyle St, in Uptown. The place is now part of St Augustine College campus. I had no idea that besides gangsters there were also movie stars in Chicago during that period.
Chicago Urbanite 