Lava and smoke

exhibit about Hawaiian volcano eruption, originally uploaded by Vilseskogen.

A little corner exhibit at the Field Museum in Chicago tried to showcase the lava eruptions in Hawaii using darkness, glow lights and LED lights. Did they succeed? What do you think?

When I was walking these exhibits I was thinking that most of these dioramas are missing the impressions of so many of our senses - there need to be scents, sounds, winds, and the feeling of touch to really get the real experience.

Just looking doesn't really do it. But being in Hawaii and smelling the sulfur, stepping on crunchy lava cinder sand and feeling the warm wind is a different thing. Couldn't exhibits try to invoke some of this too? I am not sure how to do the noise and smell or the warm wind, but I bet in the future there will be movie theaters with smell makers, fans, and boxes you can put your hands into to feel any texture or surface (ick, imagine that, anything slimy or gory...).  Virtual but real.  Still, that wouldn't be the real thing.  But I have always thought that to teach history, an experience such as walking down the street in 1850s New York would tell you a lot more about history than any book. 

I love the animal dioramas with stuffed beasts and painted backgrounds with a few silk flowers at museums, but it only gives you maybe 10% of the experience of being outside in nature. It is great that parents take their kids to museums, but they should even more just take them outside to many different kinds of places (and not be afraid of rain, ticks, dirt, germs, and toxic plants). How can you describe something to a kid that has never had that experience? You can't describe sulfur smell, it is unknown to you until you have actually smelled the rotten egg smell from a stinking boiling pot in Yellowstone. So, let's get out more. And put a sulfur smelling station next to the lava exhibit.

Sparkles

diamonds, originally uploaded by Vilseskogen.

I never knew it was so hard to photograph diamonds. This brooch is from the Field Museum in Chicago, and it was a lot more sparkling in real life.

Chicago memory, part 3 - tapas luxury

Grasp the luxurious opportunities when you can take them, time-wise and financially. It might be one piece of chocolate, a sunny spot in the park, a lonely afternoon in the sofa with a book, digging a hole for a new plant, or splurging on a memorable fancy meal, even if alone in a foreign town. The last thing is what I did the last night in Chicago, while it stormed, thundered and rained near-horizontally outside.  The restaurant is called Mercat a la Planxa, and is a Catalonian tapas restaurant in the old historic Blackstone Hotel on S Michigan Avenue. (Sidenote to the restaurant here - please remove your annoying intro page with music on your home page.)

I ordered the Chef's selection, where they bring you tapas and you don't really know what you will get. It is like a tasting menu, and perfect for one person because they make sure you get many small one-person sized dishes. The waiter, who was very professional and personal at the same time, said "you are up for a treat". Expensive and fantastic! It was seriously worth the money. 

I had a glass of a wine from a grape I have never tried before - Albariño, a white grape similar to Chardonnay and it was fantastic. The wine was called Gran Vinum Nessa, from the Rias Baixas region.  Incredibly great and highly recommended.

It started with a plate with ash-rinded goat cheese, jamon ham, bread, and a small slice of potato tortilla omelet with saffron sauce.  The goat cheese was incredible.  I think it was called Monteverde, but I am not sure. With it was served three condiments, a coarse mustard, chilies pickled in oil, and small gherkin-pickles, all great.  The chilies weren't too hot, but perfect.

The 'house bread' showed up next, a thick foccacia-like slice with fresh tomatoes, basil, and garlic spread on top.  The garlic made the difference and it was wonderfully sweet-tart. I want to make this at home!

The flatbread with porcini mushrooms and Catalan sausage was one of my favorites (photo above). The butternut squash raviolis served on top of lamb ragu with beech mushrooms (looked like small chanterelles) and bacon was nearly equally as good, which means it was all among the best food I have ever eaten.  The microherb greens they used made it extra special, such as small tiny parsley leaves and sage leaves. 

Shrimp are called gambas in Spain and I got two different kinds.  Some smaller, peeled ones cooked in chili oil, garlic and parsley that melted in your mouth, mmmm.  And later, one large, unpeeled grilled one, with white dipping sauce.

The hot dishes ended with two new additions to the table - baby spinach cooked with pine nuts, sherry, apple pieces and currants.  Another sweet-tart mix that was delicious. Melt in your mouth. Give me more. Can't have enough... The gambas and lamb chop was served with red romesco sauce from red peppers and a chili-mayonnaise sauce. One of the best things was that all of the warm dishes were served HOT.  I am tired of cold dishes at restaurants, like the one I had had the night before at the Zapatista Mexican restaurant.

The lamb chop was grilled but with some spice mix rubbed on it.  It was incredible.  The best lamb chop I have ever eaten, so tender and so perfect.  The whole meal was one long amazing experience, and despite dining alone I didn't feel alone.  People around me, a gorgeous room, a little book to take notes in, soft music, and outside that stormy night. Other lonely diners sat there texting and checking their blackberries and iphones but not me...  I have a feeling that people that need to text (and get interrupted by getting text messages) are feeling lonelier than the ones that can appreciate something like this even if I rather would have good friends with me.  I took it all in and decided to share it with you this way instead.

So if you are visiting Chicago, and have the time and money, go and splurge at Mercat a la Planxa. It was probably one of the ten best meals of my life (with the top ten including Albert's Kök in Sweden, Amada in Philadelphia, T J Buckley's in Brattleboro, Vermont, and the bison burger at Miss Bellows Falls Diner also in Vermont...).

OK, time to make some tapas at home soon...

Chicago memory, part 3 - fake copper

If this had been real copper it would have been gone by now, but it is painted wood on the outside of the historically landmarked Auditorium building in Chicago. It is located on S Michigan Avenue, a street that goes from the fanciest addresses (think 5th Ave in NY) and down south to areas that have been very run down for many, many years (kind of like 5th Avenue in New York going up into Harlem, but here it is southwards). Along S Michigan Avenue are many old classic hotels and buildings, and it is also next to the large city park with the Shedd Aquarium and Field Museum, veterans from the last-last century (that is the 19th century, not 20th..).

On this building, which now seems boarded up, was the tiniest and nicest No trespassing sign I have ever seen - about 4 x 8 cm and in brass.

Chicago memory, part 2 - stacks, tracks and tanks...

The only day during my Chicago trip with acceptable weather was the day I had free from work, so I took the train on the old Union Pacific (I believe, it said UP), trainline with the METRA commuter train north to the suburbs to visit the Chicago Botanic Garden.  More about the garden later, but the trainride was an experience in itself.



The double-decker traincars were something else.  You walk in at the end of the car, and then climb up or down - up to the second floor which are just two narrow strips of floor with a line of seats along each window wall, and open to the level below in the center.  Below there were two rows of seats as on a normal train car.  It was all tiny and low above, but the openness to the level below made you feel not so claustrophobic.  The conductor didn't even bother walking upstairs, he just stretched out his hand from below up to us at our ankle-level to get our tickets.  They sure do things different in Chicago.  Maybe their bridges are too low for a regular double-decker commuter train car?



So, I sat on the top floor, looked out through greenish tinted and dirty train windows, and saw the city go by, through old industry areas, nice little neighborhoods, and they all looked so much cleaner than in the East, even if poor.  I started taking photos of watertanks and smokestacks, one after another.  Old smokestacks used as advertising space, or cell phone towers high or low, and so on.  Old water tanks, which I think are so American because I never see them in any other cities of the world, of various shapes and placement, and sometimes also with advertisement on them.  One had fallen down.



We passed the Morton Salt factory, where they make (made?) the table salt that 'when it rains it pours', so you don't have to deal with clumps in your salt.  I have bought Morton salt many times and it still has the same old nice design on its containers in the supermarket.



And there were train tracks of course, and old and new train things next to them.  Old flat cars and smaller things.  Two diesel engines, one yellow and another red, but very blurry on the photos so not included here.  It was an interesting experience, a real trip through history from a higher point than usual.

Click on the little thumbnails to see the photos larger if you like - there are so many that I added them as thumbnails this time. I apologize for the grittiness of the photos but they were taken through a train window and most at rather high speed.

Chicago memory, part 1 - Norwegian adventures

In the taxi van at the airport and on my way to downtown Chicago, a Norwegian couple enter the van, with the man furiously angry at his wife because she had no small dollar bills available as a tip to the guy carrying their luggage.  I turned around, said, in Swedish - "you can pay later, he is our driver ", and the man cheered up and the wife smiled. Then the man said - "I know, I get so angry and frustrated when I shouldn't" - in Norwegian of course.

They had just landed after a long trip from Stockholm and the next day a rental car would be dropped off at their hotel for their 14-day trip driving old Route 66, from Chicago to Los Angeles.  Route 66 is the old classic route across America that many people drove in the 1950s... it is lined with classic but rundown hotels, scenery, and has become popular in recent years as something to do on vacation, apparently especially in the Nordic countries, said the Norwegian, who also said the REAL way to do it was on a Harley-Davidson, but he was too old for that. Plus he had no license for a motorcycle, he told me regretfully.

But first, the retired man informed me, "there will be spare ribs for dinner! American ribs, yeah!". He continued "all food is good in America", and "we are going to drive and drink Jack Daniels".  When I asked how far they had to drive he said -" I don't know, but I think 14 days is enough". I hope they are having fun and I hope they save the Jack Daniels for the evenings. They were a funny couple, the kind that made you laugh all the time, and I wonder what the other passengers were thinking hearing the Swedish and Norwegian languages mixing in the van. God tur, Norwegians!

Maybe only in America....

... and maybe only in Chicago, Illinois, the home of the old, large slaughterhouses, can there be a Baconfest... and there was, last weekend.  A few weeks ago the organizers noted:

"Baconfest 2011 is totally sold out and tickets cannot be had for love or money. " 

Their manifesto is worth reading too:

"We live in one moment in a great continuum – a single fatty cross section of our lives – a straight line from birth to death, punctuated by cured meat."

I love people that do what they believe in while making many people around them happy, not poor, and not stupid.

Restaurant review: A crazy seafood place...

If you have seen the film Forrest Gump, which is worth seeing, you might remember some scenes in the film where they buy a shrimp trawler and start catching shrimp in the Southern United States. This inspired some people, and they started a restaurant chain, probably the first to be influenced by a film. So here it is, Bubba Gump Shrimp company, started in 1994, and with restaurants all over the US. Each restaurant looks like a rustic shack filled with memorabilia, nostalgia, and hot sauces. I visisted the one in Chicago this summer with a friend of mine from Germany.

On each table are license plates, one that says RUN FORREST RUN, and you let that one show when you want something from the waiter. When you don't need anything, flip it over to STOP FORREST STOP. The menu is seafood of course, a lot of traditional Southern US food, which means deepfried, greens, french fries, cajun spices (spicy), and large amounts of food.

Here is a mixed appetizer plate - BBQ chicken wings with dip sauce, fried clams, fried scallops, fried coconut shrimp, onion rings, and coleslaw salad (cabbage in vinegar and mayonnaise dressing). Everything is served in small baskets and you eat most food with your hands. It was good!!! Very greasy though.

Next dish was the weird and fancy. Whole crawfish tails with the shell on, deep fried in batter with cajun seasoning. We assumed you were supposed to eat the shell, so we did. It wasn't as hard as Swedish crawfish shells, but still very crunchy with soft and GOOD crawfish meat inside. Peeling them would have been impossible.

The newspaper in the basket isn't recycled newspaper, it is especially printed for the restaurant. Kind of a waste.

Right behind us was an enormous shelf with hot sauces, here is just a small sample. In Sweden in the 80s I remember hot sauce as Tabasco, and that was it. Times have changed. Here you have Nuclear Waste, Pyromania, Red Lightning, Lethal Weapon, and Jump Up and Kiss Me.

Of course the restaurant has a whole store you have to pass through when you leave, with the necessities such as T-shirts, hats, hot sauces, mugs, and key chains - all with the Bubba Gump logo on it. Ah, commercialism. But the food was good, I'll come back for more. I forgot, they served beer in real ice cold glasses too!

Ghost boats in Chicago

Some boats aren't really there.

All photos at the harbor in Chicago at Lake Michigan.

New light on the Swedish stone in Chicago

Hi everybody!

I just had to ask the Swedish Museum of History about the mysterious round stone.
Here is their answer.

Here you can read more and see the mysterious stone Signs of sweden in Chicago by LS
In short (LS can you translate the whole thing? Done/LS)

The round stones are found in Lake Malar valley on top of graves, dating back to 500 AC. The round stones are believed to mark female graves and the erected stones are male graves. This is not certain though. The Swedish museum of History has not found anything in their records about this particular stone but its probable that its a Swedish stone.
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Hej E!
Den sten du frågar om som din syster sett i Chicago är förmodligen ett gravklot som varit placerad på en stensättning. Sådana förekom under järnålder, bland annat för ca 1500 år sedan. Så vad gäller tidsaspekten stämmer skylten – att det skulle vara tidig stenålder då är dock fel. Inte heller var det vikingatid för 1500 år sedan (rubriken Swedish Viking Monument). Perioden då kallas folkvandringstid och spänner på ett ungefär över 400- och 500-tal.

Att klotet har påträffats i Mälardalen kan mycket väl stämma. De är förhållandevis vanliga här. Man brukar säga generellt att gravklot har placerats på kvinnogravar medan resta stenar har markerat mansgravar, men om det verkligen stämmer är kanske inte helt självklart. Under den här tiden förekom det ganska ofta att flera personer begravdes i samma grav, och ofta var de av olika kön.

Om stenen verkligen kommer från Historiska museet är osäkert. Museet har gravklot i sina samlingar men jag har inte kunnat hitta några uppgifter om att något skulle ha förts till USA. Förmodligen är det så att någon från Historiska museet har presenterat stenen för översten i fråga men att det är en sten som man fört över utan att den tillhörde museets samlingar. Eller så stämmer kanske inte uppgiften om museet på skylten.

Hälsningar,
Lotta Fernstål
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Lotta Fernstål fil.dr arkeologi – Ph.D. Archaeology 1:e antikvarie – Senior Curator Statens historiska museum – Museum of National Antiquities Enheten för samlingar – Collections P.O. Web: http://www.historiska.se/

[Short summary of the letter by LS:
Yes, the stone could be from the Lake Malaren Valley, and these stones were placed usually on women's graves 1500 years ago, the 'iron age', or more specifically the 'people wandering's age'. It has nothing do to with vikings, and nothing to do with stone age. There is also no record of The Historical Museum giving anything like this to Chicago, but maybe someone gave something to an individual and then that individual gave it to Chicago. But the stone was never part of the Historical museum's collections.
- - - - -
Min fråga [My question]:

Hej!
Min syster har nyligen varit i Chicago och tittade då på Tribune building där de satt in stenar från olika delar av världen, bland annat Sverige. Bland de svenska föremålen fanns denna sten, med en förklarande plakett under. Informationen kan inte stämma, det har vi insett, men vad är det egentligen? Och kommer den verkligen från Historiska museet?
Hälsningar EH

Signs of Sweden in Chicago

Many immigrants from Sweden either ended up in Chicago or came through the town on their way to other places. But you can't tell this from visiting. Instead there are other remnants of Sweden that I just happened to find while walking around. Here is a tour:


The building to the right, very ornate with an American flag on top is the Tribune building (as in the newspaper Chicago Tribune). In its walls, they have inserted rocks and bricks from famous buildings around the world.



Such as a brick from Stadshuset in Stockholm. At least I assume that is what they mean with Ancient Town Hall.


Another brick, this from the Old Swedes Church in the old colony New Sweden, now Delaware, not far from New Jersey. The Swedes were here early, already in the mid 1600s.


Now this is something strange, a "Swedish Viking Monument". This is apparently from somewhere close to Lake Mälaren, our home range in Sweden and according to the inscription "is a fine example of the crudely worked monuments which Sweden's early stone age men placed on the graves of their heroes". It was given to Chicago by the Swedish Museum of History in 1953. Now, first, as far as I remember, the stone age was not 500 AD in Sweden, that must have been the Iron age (correct me if I am wrong... at least the Viking age was around 1000 AD, and there was Bronze and Iron ages between the Stone age and the vikings). Also, I don't remember seeing any carved round stones on either stone age graves or viking graves - have you? Raised stones, yes, runestones, yes, stones in boat formation, yes, heaps of stones, yes, but a round stone on top, no! Maybe a correction is in order here?


I jumped into the famous department store Marshall Field's, which is now Macy's, and down in the basement I found some old leather bound books that were used as props among their antiques for sale. Yep! Swedish, nearly all of them. Classics, like Bonniers Lexicon, Änkleken, and Svenska folkets underbara öden. Maybe they came from some 1880's immigrant's chest of things brought over.




Finally, right outside Marshall Field's was a big construction site, and on it, what met my eye if not some real Swedish: Du Är Vacker ("you are beautiful"). I am not sure if they referred to the construction site or the people that read all the different phrases in different languages. Someone needs to tell them that you don't capitalize all the words in a sentence too :)

Seen in Chicago: corn babies

For those of you that have never heard of a corn dog - it is a hot dog surrounded by cornbread that is baked or fried, not sure which, on a stick. Kids love it, and it is not healthy :)

I think Americans love things on sticks and things that are fried. In Minnesota they deepfry Snicker bars... say no more...

Update: see a live corn dog here.

Labels: Beer Calls

Seen on a beer glass in Chicago, content is an 'Urban Wheat Ale' made locally.

(Listening to while posting: humming harddrive and grasshoppers' last effort before the fall is here. A chirping bird too, and wind in the leaves of the sugar maple.)

Fashionable rain gear

As seen in Chicago, the latest for the kids!
I think MH would love the fire car.

Certainly a bit different from the old green Tretorns we had.

The joy of music in Chicago

Here is my confession that will make PP very jealous - we went out out to the music bar Chicago blues tonight and listened to the band The Shirley Johnson Blues Band, and boy, were they good. Now it is 2 AM and I am dropping like a rock into bed. But my mind is filled with great blues music. With us were people from Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan - many of which that had never heard one blues song in their lives. They liked it too. The singer, Shirley Johnson, herself, was fantastic! Voice close to Ella Fitzgerald, but the music was generally faster. Ah, it was just SO great.

Art in Chicago: The Thorne Rooms

At the Institute for Art in Chicago there is a famous collection of about 50 miniature rooms made in the early 1900s. They are inset in the wall and only backlighted with light coming in from windows in the back or the side walls, so there is no lightning at all in the room themselves. I took some photos, without flash, so they are grainy (sorry about that), but I think you get the idea. The rooms were designed by the wife of the owner of a fancy department store in Chicago, Marshall Field's, and the Montgomery Ward stores (like Ahlens in Stockholm), and she hired artisans to make the furniture, walls, needlepoint, etc. All items where handmade, and often of the correct type of wood. After a lot of digging in the book I have I found out her maiden name was Narcissa Niblack, but she is always mentioned as Mrs. James Ward Thorne in our book.

I loved this collection, which I had never heard about before. I just happened to run into it when I was visiting and saw the sign "Thorne Miniature Rooms". The scale is 1 inch = 1 foot, a scale she started to use that later became standard for miniature works like this and dollhouses. There are other of these rooms at other museums across the country, so now I have more places I need to visit.
She started with making a series of European rooms from different periods (Louis XIV, Victorian British, etc.) but those didn't interest me as much as the American rooms she designed later. I especially liked the kitchen. They looked 'lived in', cozy, and the light coming in from the windows made them look so welcoming. Below is the New Mexico Dining Room (c. 1940). She was very exact with the details, so note the beams, the typical adobe fireplace, and the rugs. Below is the Pennsylvania kitchen (1752), which looks like something that could have been from this area in New Jersey's area too. It is a kitchen in a Pennsylvania Dutch house (Amish, or similar). Look at the glass on the table, it is probably only 4 mm high, and still copies the original design.
And here is a third kitchen, this one a Massachusetts living room and kitchen (1675-1700). Look at the typical elliptic rugs, you can still see them used around here. This kitchen is supposed to represent a Pilgrim kitchen in the Boston area about 50 years after they first settled. Glass was very expensive since it had to be imported, so windows were small and of many small pieces of glass.
And, for comparison, a English COttage Kitchen from the Queen Anne period (1702-1714). In the book I got it says that the hooked rugs on the floor are not typical of this kitchen, since they were invented in America and only available later. Instead floors like this had dry grass or sedges strewn over them, which was swept out when it got too dirty. But I bet that didn't look as neat.