First Journey inside the USA – Chicago (part II)

Continuing our journey to Chicago, we decided to visit a Brazilian supermarket near Chicago’s downtown before the hotel. I drove 2 hours and 30 minutes to Chicago, but reaching the city, I spent an extra hour just to cross part of the city because the terrible traffic in Chicago.

I found Pepe’s Supermarket  (it’s a small grocery store) ,searching on the Internet looking for Brazilian food. We reached Pepe’s earlier in the afternoon, but it’s a normal grocery store with only an aisle of some Brazilian foods such as cheese bread, guaraná soda, Passatempo, cassava flour, Brazilian coffee, etc.  I bought some things just as a reminder from my country.

Walking a few blocks from Pepe’s there is another grocery store that is selling the same kind of food but with an extra.  The name of this place is “Brasil Legal,” and this store is owned by a Brazilian lady called Silvana. The store has a Brazilian specialty called “coxinha”, that Americans call a chicken ball. My wife and I ordered “coxinha” and guaraná soda for our lunch. I can tell you that it was delicious !!!

Thank you Silvana for good food and hospitality……..

After this good time, I spent another one hour in Chicago’s traffic to come back to downtown and another 30 minutes to find the hotel with the GPS (it’s not working properly through the tallest buildings at Chicago’s downtown) but in the end, I found the hotel…….

Let’s start the four-day weekend !!!!!!

First Journey inside the USA – Chicago (part I)

As I mentioned in a earlier post, I planned to visit Chicago during this Thanksgiving holiday, so it’s time to tell you what happened there. But instead of starting with my journey, I would like to tell some interesting things that happened before we reached the hotel.

Starting on the Saturday before Thanksgiving, my wife and I were trying to use the car wash here. In Brazil you leave your car at the car wash and pick it up after 2 hours totally clean (inside and outside).  Here in the USA, we only knew that it’s an automatic line and it only cleans the outside. We started with the Jeep, that has the spare tire outside the truck and there was a cover on it. There was not problem to do this, in fact it was easy, and the only major work was to put the wheel in the track to start the process. During the wash, it was strange to be inside the car looking at all those brushes coming toward you, but so far it was good.

We left the car wash and it was looking good, but after we reached our house we realized that there was no cover on the spare tire anymore. It was okay, because it was an old one. After this loss, we went with the other car and everything was good, but we did not recover the spire tire cover!

At that time, our car it was ready to the trip.

Future Plan........

This week there are no huge adventures to report, so I decided to tell about my plan for the Thanksgiving weekend.

My wife and I have planned to visit some cities and tourist places here in the United States during these three years here in the U.S.A. We would like to visit New York City, Florida (Disney World), Niagara Falls, Las Vegas. Those are the primary destinations, but as our start, we decided to visit Chicago during the Thanksgiving weekend.

We are checking the hotels, parking lots in downtown, and interesting things that we can do during the Thanksgiving weekend. Our initial plan is to spend 3 days there. The first day we will spend visiting the Millennium Park and Michigan Avenue, the second one we will visit the downtown with a bus tour, and the third one we will go to the Field Museum. The last day of this long weekend, we will spend at home relaxing because on Monday I'll need to go to work, and my wife will have classes in the morning.

I can tell you more details about this trip after Thanksgiving.

Pumpkins…..

Many times in different movies, TV shows, and cartoons (during the fall season) I have seen the pumpkins as a big and strong symbol here in America. During the week I heard some comments about a pumpkin patch in a little town near here. My wife also found their website (www.the200acres.com), so we decided to visit this event.

After doing some homework on Saturday morning, we ( my wife and I) left Decatur for a 1 hour drive to Arthur, and the amazing things started when I arrived in the city. I saw some black horse-driven buggies, women wearing long dresses and also riding bicycles. I realized that maybe I was near an Amish community (a bonus for my trip!).

Arriving in the pumpkin patch I really noticed the size of American’s passion for the fall season. The place was crowded, starting from the parking lot, but fortunately I found a place almost at the entrance of the patch. Inside there were pumpkins everywhere, but also there were many mums (flowers).

For me the best part of the trip was outside the patch. First there was the bakery with a lot of cakes, cookies, and breads. Also  I visited a traditional restaurant in town with a large buffet (including home cooked food and a delicious chocolate dessert). The only problem in this amazing restaurant was waiting almost one hour inside the gift shop area…

That was a good and different Saturday …… now let’s eat the pumpkin bread!