Archive for May, 2007

Monday was Memorial Day (which is always the last Monday of May) in US. On that the day they honor the soldiers who have died in military service for their country and there were of course some speeches going on in Chicago and the following pictures I’ve taken in Grant Park where they put the boots of all the 3,500 soldiers that have died while their duty in Iraq. But I’ve never heard anyone mention that there have died around 65,000 to 70,000 civilians while that war…Anyway this day was historically established to commemorate the US soldiers died in the American Civil War and I can understand that they celebrate this day since then and on the weekend I’ve seen some demonstration going on against this senseless war so nobody can say that all Americans support it. In my opinion every life that ends caused by war is one life too much.

Here are some pictures taken on Memorial Day.

And this is one of Chicago’s famous attractions in the millenium park called “The Bean” which is a 110-ton, highly polished steel monolith shaped like a kidney bean and draws some very cool reflections as you can see on the pictures below:

And whoever told you that money lies on the streets in US was right

Yesterday I’ve been to Lincoln Park and Lincoln Zoo. This entry goes especially to Caro as she was asking me for some animal pictures . I hope you’ll like them.

Sight of Chicago as seen from Lincoln Park:

Some geese on the parking lot in front of the Lincoln Park Zoo:

Flamingos in the Zoo:

Sleeping lions:

Another view of Chicago as seen from Lincoln Park:

On the way from the client site to the center of Chicago there is an original recreation of the first store of McDonald’s which was opened by the founder of the McDonald’s Corporation, Roy Kroc, on April 15, 1955. Those were the times when at McDonald’s fresh potatoes were peeled, sliced, blanched and fried

And now McDonald’s has restaurants in 120 countries all over the world with a revenue of $ 20.460 billion.

This is how the first store of McDonald’s looked like:

Last Sunday my colleague and I did a little trip up to Milwaukee which is a 1,5 hour drive by car. The plan was to visit the Miller Lite brewery one of the biggest breweries in this area. It was a nice drive up there all along the highway and once arrived in Milwaukee we recognized that there is not much worth to see so we went directly to the brewery to find out that it is closed on Sundays . I have checked the web site before but didn’t see that it is closed on Sunday. But I have got some pictures for you.

This is the brewery:

In front of an old Miller truck:

And another rental car I had this week:

I’ve promised some pictures and here they are. Enjoy! As always comments are appreciated.

We took the Metra (metro) to get from Northbrook to downtown to save the money for the parking space but this turned out to be a bad idea as there was a fire on the track when we tried to return from Chicago in the evening so we hat to take a cab to get back which was even more expensive than a parking space would be for 3 days

Little note for Austrians: These trains here have two floors

This is the view out of the window of the apartment of the cousin of one of my colleagues:

Seagull in front of the civic opera building:

Me and myself on the Washington bridge:

We (Raj, Devesh and I) did the architecture tour with Shoreline Sightseeing:

This tour was going along the Chicago River and offered a lot of sights like the famous Sears tower (which was the worlds tallest building from 1973 to 1998):

Chicago Skyline:

Huge sailing boat called “Windy” (for the windy city) at Navy Pier:

One “special effects”-picture at Navy Pier:

Me and myself at the Beach:

Chicago skyline again as seen from Lincoln park:

Lincoln park: