Got up at 11 after spending the early a.m. hours reading the entirety of The Lovely Bones. Meh to the book.
On our way to dim sum, Tess and I make a pit stop (in my tank of a rental Kia) at Lake Michigan, a vast, and in good weather, foam-green swath big enough to pretend you're by the ocean.
This thing ain't no joke.
There's a 30 minute wait for dim sum at the Phoenix Restaurant in Chicago's Chinatown, so Tess and I hop on over to Saint's Alp tea house for some bubble tea. (Apparently, you don't get the tapioca as a matter of course. I'm like, dude, do you not see me? Do I look like I don't want giant balls of edible starch in the bottom of my drink?)
Then, the usual: greasy pork spareribs chopped into knuckley bits, char siu bao, har gau, shu mai, oily meatballs, shrimp in those slippery rice noodles, steamed tofu skin roll, and...chicken feet.
As shameful as it is, and I know this makes me a discredit to my race, this was my first occasion to eat los pies del pollo. Thoughts? Skin-ny and fatty. It's not the freak show I made it out to be when I was a kid, but it ain't nothin' to write home about neither.
After lunch is another bubble tea joint so the gents can get dessert, I guess. This place is called "Joy Yee Noodle: Pan-Asian Cuisine." They run a take-out counter with myriad bubble teas, bubble slushes, bubble what-have-you, and for the non-discerning client, of course, bubble-less variations of the above. One of the boys orders an avocado shake with tapioca--visions of avocado and chocolate shakes in Indonesia, blech--and while my sip of it is decent enough, an unfortunate childhood incident with avocado, in addition to basic etiquette, prevent any further tastings.
The glass walls are awash in that distinctly Japanese-y of customs: displays of fake food made from dyed plastic, and I notice one simple bamboo tray mounded with (plastic) soba noodles. I'm deeply intrigued by this, and suggest to Tess that we come back and eat here. She doesn't seem convinced, and it's probably for the best, as "Pan-Asian" typically doesn't bode well, and the combination of "Pan-Asian" and "Chinatown" is particularly foreboding.
On our way to drop off one of Tess' friends, we drive past the Vagina Building, aka the Smurfit-Stone Building--there's an apocryphal story around it, that it was a feminist design in response to the phallic heights of the skyscrapers around it, but, alas, the story's been debunked.
The most women's libby building in the Chicago skyline is actually this guy--I mean, gal on the right, called the Aqua Tower:
It's the tallest building to be designed by a firm headed by a woman. Fascinating, I know. (I mean, I guess it is. Just less fascinating than someone saying, "I'm going to build a giant vagina as a big ol' fuck you.")
We also drive past Wrigley Field, which I'm told is famous because of the Cubs, and Ferris Bueller and, speaking of vaginas, A League of Their Own.
Fun times.
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