{Art Institute and the Bean}

WARNING - AWESOME PICTURE OVERLOAD.

Back during my senior year of high school I traveled with the band to Chicago for a trip - it was so so fun! I had a blast with all my friends there and exploring the city with them. It's weird being back now and revisiting some of the same places and having that deja vu feeling a little bit.

One of these places was the Art Institute of Chicago - I loved that place when I went over 3 years ago and I enjoyed it even more this trip. So fun! Here are some pictures:

After the museum we went to the "Bean" [Cloud Gate is it's real name] and took some crazy awesome shots. This is located downtown in Millennium Park:

{Taste of Chicago}

The husband and I love food - I mean, LOVE food. We love to make food, we love to eat food, one of our favorite things to do is to go out to eat at fun/new places.....we love food.
Well - Chicago does this wonderful thing every year called "Taste of Chicago." In a park downtown restaurants come and set up booths where they sell some of the signature items off of their menus. You buy tickets beforehand or at the entrance that allows you to purchase food from the vendors. The best part - you can buy smaller "taste" samples of the food which cost a lot less - wonderful! So - the husband and I went down TWICE [we bought way too many tickets the first time, but we weren't too upset about that] to Taste of Chicago to have dinner. We walked along the crowed streets with dozens of sweaty people, elbowing our way through to buy only the small bite sized portions [that actually turned out to be way larger than we had anticipated] and then split those. We decided to attack the festival this way so that we could sample dozens of different kinds of food. It was so fun! Both times we went we met up with one or two of the husband's work friends which was awesome.
Unfortunately we didn't take a ton of pictures because we were too busy stuffing our faces - but enjoy these ones:

*Some people told us it wasn't worth the time or hassle to go - but we decided to try it out anyways - so glad that we did! I can definitively see this experience being terrible if you went in the middle of the day on a weekday or if you had a couple kids that you had to keep your eye on and feed.....that would be a completely different story and we probably wouldn't have enjoyed it. But it was just perfect for us!

{Randolph Market Earrings}

Due to popular request [aka my mom sending me an email] here are the earrings that I got at Randolph Market. They are wonderful and come straight from the 70s/80s. PLUS they were only 2/$1 - amazing right? Even if they don't last forever they are for sure worth the $0.50, am I right?

{Randolph Market and Architecture Boat Tour}

Like it was mentioned earlier, we live out in the burbs of Chicago and not in the middle of downtown, but that does not mean that we haven't frequently visited it :) We drive about 1/2 way to downtown then take the "L" or metro into the heart of the city so we don't have to worry about parking downtown and it's much more convenient that way.

The first weekend we went to downtown Chicago was awesome! We stopped by Randolph Street Market which was a wonderful outdoor market that sold all sorts of antique stuff as well as some other random cool things. Here's a couple pictures we snapped there:

 I got a couple pair of vintage earrings that are wonderful that I would post a picture of but I'm too lazy to run upstairs and snap a shot of them, so..... just imagine their wonderfulness. We also got this crazy awesome book:

We bought it from a lady who buys old books and then folds their pages into cool designs so the book is for decor and not reading. The book we bought is a book that is full symphony themes - it's amazing. We figured it would look fabulous on our piano back in provo. It was a pretty neat find!

Later that day we met up with some of the other interns at Sears and went on the Architecture Boat Tour of Chicago. It was very cool! It was a long boat ride with a tour guide who taught us a little bit about the history of the city, what different buildings were, architectural styles, etc... it was quite fascinating! Chicago truly is a beautiful city! Pictures: