Chicago for the weekend

Friday morning I woke Kevin up and asked him if he wanted to organize and clean the garage or go out of town for the weekend. Humm... it didn't take him long to choose to go of town. "Well, what do you have in mind?" he asked. I replied, "The dragonboat races are going on in Chicago's Chinatown this weekend. Wanna go?"

Friday afternoon we packed up and headed out, spending Saturday night at my grandparents' lake home along the way. Saturday morning we arrived in Chinatown and headed to Ping Tom Memorial park along the Chicago River. There were multiple teams sponsored by businesses and civic groups. One of the most enthusiastic groups I watched were the Chicago firefighters. Groups wore matching t-shirts and seemed like they were having a lot of fun. There were four boats, and two boats raced in each heat while the other two boats were being unloaded and reloaded with racing teams. The boats looked like large long wooden canoes and were decorated in bright colors with dragons on front. A person in back of the boat beat a drum to keep the rowers together. A person at the front stretched out over the front of the boat to grab the finish flag at the end of the race. There was also a pavilion with entertainment. I listened to some signers including a group of children from a Chinese Language School. They were pretty cute, and I knew one of the songs about two tigers!

For lunch we went back to Mountain View Dim Sum in the Chinatown mall, the same place that we had dim sum last time. We selected new dishes that we had never had before. My favorite is the turnip cake with X.O. sauce. Kevin is partial to the chicken sticky rice in lotus leaf. We're impressed that Kevin's brother was a good sport and tried everything, even though he's certainly not an adventurous eater.

We went shopping and bought three small embroidered art pieces for the nursery, a little light and dark pink Chinese outfit for Hannah, and some other miscellaneous items.

After a little napping in the air conditioned hotel room, we drove downtown to wander around Millennium Park and see the Cloud Gate sculpture. It's amazing! We have the neatest photographs of ourselves and the Chicago skyline.

Our hungry bellies took us to Giordano's for their famous stuffed Chicago style pizza. Oh my! That's a pizza pie!

We spent today at the Science and Industry museum. My feet are blistered and sore. We had a great time!

In adoption news, we got an e-mail from the adoption agency Friday night. They have all of our documents and are translating our dossier and state adoption laws. Everything will be sent to St. Lucy's on Monday or Tuesday. St. Lucy's takes about a week to review the documents and then they are filed in court. From here on, we most likely won't hear any news about any progress unless something is wrong. No news is good news. Never fear, we've got plenty of baby prep things to keep us busy (and blog about).