The rest of the flight and arrival in Chicago

The flight from LA to Chicago was much shorter but somehow much more annoying. First of all the plane was much smaller and I had a tiny seat somewhere in the middle. But this would not have been that bad if it was not for the kids one row behind me…..

Maybe it was just me being jealous of their seemingly unbounded energy that allowed them to scream and fidget around for four hours, whereas I was completely exhausted from the previous flight. Or, I envied the relative size of their seating space, which would allow them to fully stretch their legs. However those legs were just long enough to efficiently and constantly kick the back of my seat and – as the lovely child luckily only discovered towards the end of the flight – stick them between the seat cushion and the upright part – you can image the rest….. After having lugged around my luggage LA airport, I also might have begrudged them their strength in being able to hit the side panels hard enough so that my tired head would bounce of the pillow, thus interrupting the occasional few seconds of merciful slumber.

Or they were just really annoying little….

The time in Chicago, however, compensated me for this suffering. I stayed with my friend Chuck

in his hundred year old Victorian house in the – guess what – German neighbourhood of Chicago.

The house from the outside.

And the charming interior.

The next morning I got the insider tour of the German neighbourhood. It was amazing, there were German restaurants and grocery stores but also a historic German pharmacy with all imported stuff that I didn’t even know still existed in Germany (Von Latschenkieferoel bis hin zu Dusch Das).

The neighbourhood has a really interesting character being American and German at the same time. I think the following photo actually sums it up nicely.