Little tidbits of wisdom from Chicago - Part I

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• Pumpkin spiced Latte schmeckt mir richtig gut

• Matcha green Latte riecht fürchterlich, schmeckt aber ganz ok. 

• Die Resaturants sind eigentlich immer ganz gut besucht und um in einem der guten Restaurants in der Innenstadt eine Platz u bekommen  muss man zwei Wochen vorher reservieren

• Es gibt in meiner Gegend jede Menge kleiner Wochenmaerkte, auf denen man auch ‘organic” Food bekommt.

• Eine Spezialitaet hier ist ‘Deep Dish Pizza’ - das hat mit Pizza wie wir sie kennen aber nicht mehr viel zu tun: das ist eher ein Boden in Quiche-Tiefe angefüllt mit Kaese. ich schaffe gerade mal eine halbe…

• Leider mag ich die Chips hier nicht - trotz sehr sorgfältiger Recherche und eingehender Beratung durch orts- und chipskundige Kollegen hab ich noch keine Marke für mich gefunden.

• Ein kleines Glas Bier kostet im Schnitt $8-9 und es gibt Unmengen an Craft Brews aus kleinen lokalen Brauereien - von denen mir die allermeisten auch gut schmecken trotz der manchmal schon ziemlich schrägen Namen (und so langsam weiss ich, an welchem Tag sie Happy Hour haben 😉)

• Im Hancock Tower gibt es eine nette Bar im 96.Stock, die keinen Eintritt kostet. Mit ein bisschen Glück (das wir hatten) gibts keinen Nebel, keine Schlange am Aufzug und man bekommt auch einen Platz am Fester: Dann geniesst man einen super schönen Blick ueber die Innenstadt und den Loop!
  Im Übrigen auch von der Damentoilette aus…

• Es gibt Chicago-Nutella.

• Kaffee gibts manchmal in Papp-Boxen (und er bleibt trotzdem warm!).

• I do love Pumpkin spiced latte

• Matcha green latte smells terrible, but tastes quite ok.

• There are a lot of small weekly markets in my area where you can get organic food

• A specialty in Chicago is 'Deep Dish Pizza' – which is not pizza as we know it  😉 but more like a dough bowl filled with cheese. I can only do half of a small one ...

• Unfortunately, I do not like the chips here - despite very diligent research and accompanying advice from local chip-versed colleagues, I have yet to find a brand that I like..

• A small glass of beer costs an average of $ 8-9 and there are tons of craft brews from small local breweries - most of which taste quite good despite their sometimes rather weird names - and so I'm starting to learn the days happy day they have happy hour for beer

• Shopping for groceries is quite expensive and eating out is not really fun because of the prices – but the restaurants are are quite frequented and to be able to get a table in one of the downtown restaurants, you have to make a reservation two weeks in advance

• There is no admission to the bar on the 96th floor of the Hancock Tower. With a little luck (that we had 😉) there is no fog, no queue at the elevator and you’ll even get a place at the window: there you enjoy a super nice view over the city center and the Loop!
  By the way, the view  from the ladies' room is spectacular was well...

• There is Chicago Nutella

• You can get coffee in cardboard boxes (and it even keeps warm!)

Bienvenidos a Pilsen

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An meinen freien Tagen streife ich ziemlich ziellos durch die Stadt, steige in die L (den Zug) ein und aus, wenn es irgendwie interessant aussieht - immer der Nase nach. Ich geniesse diese Ziellosigkeit, dieses Verweilen im Moment und die Möglichkeit, einem Impuls einfach folgen zu können.

Auf einer meiner mäanderenden Touren durch Chicago landete ich in Pilsen, einem Stadteil in der ‘Lower West Side’ der Stadt.

Eigentlich ausgestiegen bin ich, weil ich gesehen habe, dass die L praktisch direkt über die Häuser gebaut ist - oder zumindest so gut wie - das wollte ich mir näher ansehen.

Pilsen - das klang für mich erstmal tschechisch und ich war ein bisschen eingestellt auf Brauereien und katholische Kirchen.
Wenn ich diesen Reiseführer - den ich mir zwar vorbildlich gekauft aber irgendwie immer noch nicht gelesen habe - wenn ich diesen also ein wenig studiert hätte oder zumindest dabei gehabt hätte, hätte ich natürlich auch schon vorher wissen können, dass dieser Stadtteil ausser seinem Namen so ziemlich gar nichts mit Tschechien zu tun hat, sondern fest in mexikanischer Hand ist ;-). Von daher heisst es also:

So war das aber für mich die erste Überraschung - und ich habe den Rundgang sehr genossen - und habe auch die vielen vielen ‘Murals’ entdeckt, für die Pilsen dann auch im Reiseführer aufgeführt wird…

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On my days off, I wander around the city quite aimlessly, getting on and off the ‘L’ if anything catches my interest – one could say I get to always follow my nose. ;-)  I enjoy this aimlessness, this lingering at the moment and the opportunity to simply follow an impulse.

 On one of my meandering tours of Chicago, I landed in Pilsen, a neighborhood on the city's 'Lower West Side'.
Actually, I got off because I saw that the L was practically built directly over the houses - or at least as good as - I wanted to take a closer look.

Pilsen - that sounded Czech to me and I was a bit set on breweries and Catholic churches.

If I had read or at least brought this travel guide - which I dutifully bought but somehow have still not read - but if I would have studied this a bit I would of course already know that this district has nothing to do with the Czech Republic (apart from the name) but is firmly in Mexican hands ;-).
So that tour started with a surprise - and I really enjoyed the neighborhood- and I also discovered the many beautiful murals, for which Pilsen is listed in the travel guide ...

Traveling Burnside Project - Cimitero Monumentale

... cemeteries seem to magically attract me again ... I spend a fair amount of time on one or the other at the moment.

Mostly, I am touched by the quiet and serene mood right from the beginning. It kind of suits my current mindframe quite well - not that death is sitting in the living room again ( luckily! ) - but it sometimes seems I can feel the turbulences caused by his cloak when he turns away  ...

Apart from that, I always feel reminded of Marcel Reich Ranicki's statement that there are but two themes in literature: love and death. Standing amid those old and silent graves I feel that this ist true for live as such: the most important topics worth thinking and musing about are those two. And it feels to me as if they merge in all cemeteries as such - but exceptionally in the Cimiterio Monumentale in Milan where you can find extraordinary monuments by really great sculptors of the 1900s.

Those monuments are really very very impressive.
And most of them show love in some form and expression. Very many show young females with not really much on them in way of clothing, some are even quite erotic (to be honest, after a while I asked myself if I could find some equally beautiful male examples - and found them 😉) .

I found myself touched over and over again not just by the artistry which was very impressive all in itself but I was very moved by those emotions that were cast in bronze or carved out of stone, emotions which have not changed in all the years and centuries -  in pain and in love I found myself there over and over again.

The Burnside 35 lent itself quite beautifully to the task of capturing the serenity and the feeling if this place, I love how the swirl gives the pictures a kind of etheral quality and timelessnes. As well as the Burniside performed at landscape photography I even liked it better at those portraits and transporting the mood of this place.

Traveling Burnside Project - Verzasca

In April, Lensbaby launched the Traveling Burnside Project, where you could try this new lens for two weeks. At the moment a lot of these burnsides travel all over the world - and for two weeks a Burnside 35 was with me.

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Originally I know the Verzasca from my large format colleagues as a location for SW Fine Art Photography.

When studying and searching for routes in Google Maps (I have to admit, I sometimes do that along my morning coffee to cultivate my wanderlust a bit 😊 - formerly with atlases and road maps, today with the phone) I stumbled over this little place: Lavertezzo, a village at the Verzasca - and a little foraging revealed very quickly:
this something for me, I want to go there, too.

The Traveling Burnside Project was also a bit of a hitch to put that wish into action now - and so I found myself one morning in the small village of Lavertezzo to explore this beautiful river.

The first glance, however, was rather full of horror: everywhere I saw people with towels and picnic baskets! The river was literally besieged by bathing people, so apparently the Verzasca is not only a destination for photographers, but also for ordinary swimmers (something that always surprises me 😊)

So I went straight up the river until I could not see (or hear) the bathers any more - I did not have to go far,  after a few meters I was on my own. ... and what a wonderful river landscapeI found! The textures of the stones, the many colors, the turquoise water with rapids and swirls: that was something to marvel about. And I saw quite perfectly, that one can take pictures here without end.

For the Burnside project, I did not want to work in black and white this time, so I packed the ND filter and practically did not take it off anymore. 

However, I have to admit that I have only explored a tiny piece of the river, just around Lavertezzo a few hundred meters upriver and downriver - that certainly will not do justice to this landscape. Actually I think I would have to go there again for a few days, to see other corners as well (sounds like a plan for 2019?)