Reactivation! - Travelblog into the USA

As I already told some of you, I will re-visit this blog to use it again as my travelblog like I did for my honeymoon in New Zealand.

This season features episodes from the USA. So we arrived in Chicago after a lengthy and uneventful, 9 hour long flight and to no ones surprise, it was raining. Not a steady British drizzle, but pouring it down liter and liters of it... or should I say "gallons". Yes, numbers do not make sense here anymore.

Temperature, a staple among the numerical orientation points once it comes to telling people how the day was, just does not make sense. The weather yesterday was in the mid-40s and it was, pardon my French, arse-cold and windy and wet. 40s?!? as in 40°C? Nope, 40°F. C to F, Cow to Foxtrott and suddenly far too hot, becomes... not pleasant in different ways 😏

Anyways, I digress. So we made our way here. Tried to contact our landlord for the keys and spending about 17€ in the process... the discussion about roaming charges for the mobile phone should be extended to the US 😏

Our place is quite far out from the centre, but it is a nice quiet residential area so far on first impressions. We like it. The strange this is that nothing is really different to home. Sure bigger cars, but the general way of running things is kinda samey. They just prefer the colours red, blue and white a bit more than we do, that is about it...

Once we got settled, we took a bus to Lake Shore, lake being the Lake Michigan, one of the great lakes and boy let me tell you it is big. There, we met up with our Italian friends, Mattia & Serena, who moved from Leuven in Belgium to Chicago to extend on Mattia's research career. In the process, they had their first baby. Ladies and Gentleman, please meet baby-boy, Thomas.

 

Those two settled in really nicely into the lifestyle in Chicago and tomorrow, we'll explore the centre of Chicago together with them. Unfortunately, the forecast promises more rain, but we will make do. There are plenty of things to do here.

On the way back from Mattia and Serena's, we were fighting the jetlag, so that we could go to sleep at a semi-good time. I tried to not fall asleep by standing for the 30 minute bus ride... The result was that I hit my knee on the chair as I fell asleep standing up, rudely awoken by the malicious position of the chair in the way of my buckling knee. Just to give you an idea what the pre-zombie jetlag stage looks like, I took a picture 😁

 

Let's see what tomorrow brings! Till then.