Chicago - architecture, art and jazz

Our stay in Chicago is now coming to an end..
We've been way more cultural than in Nashville and it's been a lovely city to experience.
Yesterday was dedicated to culture alone - at first we went to the Chicago Cultural Center to have a look at the brochures and stuff there. Coincidentally there was a jazz-band playing at our arrival - it was a free concert and one of the main reasons we went to the center was to hear about concerts around the town. The band was great - a trombone, a saxophone, a drum kit and the bass. They're name was the Ullmann/Swell 4tet.
Afterwards we went to the Millennium park - a gigantic park with lots of modern sculptures of many different kinds. The Cloud Gate (aka. The Bean) was amazing - a big bean-shaped metal sculpture, polished to reflect the light. It was in front of The Art Institute of Chicago.
We went to the museum with an expectation of it to be a fairly short visit, but the museum was enormous - never seen anything like it! It took us about 3 hours to walk through the museum and we didn't even see the whole museum (we did not walk slowly!)! We saw everything from Egyptian art to Impressionistic and modern art including Monet, Picasso, Chagall and many many more...
We were starving by the end and hurried to a famous pizzeria (pizzeria UNO). We ordered the famous deep-dish pizza and it was delicious! Yummy! After the dinner we walked around on the beach, the pier and then home. To get some well deserved sleep!

Today we went to the old town - it was a very nice area to walk around, very calm with lots of old beautiful houses. From there we continued to the free Lincoln Park Zoo. It was all right, but nothing special and most of the animals were just sleeping.. Instead we went to The Conservatory and saw a lot of funky plants and flowers (check out the very 'not gay' pictures...).
Outside the Conservatory we walked into a H. C. Andersen statue, and suddenly we didn't feel so far away from good old DK. After that we had a great double cheeseburger in the park, and started walking south towards downtown and The Willis Tower. This tower is the USA's tallest building, and one of the tallest in the world and we thought we had to get up there. It was a nice experience, especially because of the so called ledges - glass boxes mounted on the outer wall of the building, which allowed you to look directly down on the street from more than 500 m high - pretty scary!
Eventually we came back home, cooked a nice dinner and made some great sandwiches for the very long bus trip we have in front of us tomorrow.

Stay tuned for our arrival to Denver, of course at a new CS host, this time a girl, Devyn. Looking forward for a new great stay and new good people to meet.

P.S. Check out the new pictures at the picasaweb link and our brand new feature: word of the day (in Danish).