1st & 2nd May

Wow! What a week that was. As you can see that I started off writing a daily blog but after the 3^rd day, i.e. Monday 30^th April, it was just not possible to keep pace with the week that sped full throttle. Before we realized and blinked the week was over. Our bodies were working 2 and half times faster than our brains. No kiddin!!!

Well, so now that I have some breather I’ll tell you what happened while we blinked? On Tuesday, 1^st May, May Day, Labor Day, Maharashtra day, Gujarat day, we visited the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Remember seeing those guys shouting out loud with some funny sign language in the movies trading something…yea that’s exactly what we saw. Brokers and agents trading in Commodities like Corn, Soya, Wheat, etc. etc. Although we could not take pictures in there, we got a great guided tour of the place and got a lot of insight into the world of commodities trading…doesn’t mean I’m in ‘em again.

The next destination was the most coveted Rotary place on earth, Rotary International World Headquarters. From shaking a hand with Paul Harris’s statue, to touching his furniture, glancing through the huge list of major donors, proudly holding India’s flag and a visit to the office of Rotary International President, Kalyan Banerjee, we did it all. It sure was an honor and I can’t thank Rotary enough for this respect.

After that overwhelming feeling, we drove past the beautiful Bahai Temple, a few ethnic neighbourhoods and a quick stop to click pictures with Michael Jordan…I mean with his statue ;-), we retired for the day. Dinner was at a lovely Mexican restaurant with Bob’s daughter Jenny and her 6 month old Austin…He’s shooo cute!

2^nd May, Wednesday was the day of our 1^st presentation. So we did little rehearsal at Marie’s house before we left for the Oak Park River Forest Rotary Club Meeting. It went off pretty well. Better than expected with the amazing response we got from the club members, who said this was the best GSE presentation they had seen so far. That was a sigh of relief!

Heard about Frank Lloyd Wright? I had not either, before some architects told me how lucky I was to visit his home, studio and some of the houses designed by him. Boy, was I in for a walk of a lifetime? I saw some of the most beeeeaaauutiful homes I could not even imagine existed. Architecture, so pretty, so thoughtful, so advanced for its time and made even more passionately. If ever you plan to visit Chicago, you simply can not not not miss this one. Take my word for it.

Following this awe striking tour, we were in for another pretty tour of Oak Park Library. A library that is hardly just a library. It’s a knowledge treasure, an art gallery, a technology park, kid’s paradise and everything you think a library cannot be. The automatic book collection system and the sorting system were so cool. They even had a little garden on the top of their terrace. It is an amalgamation of art, science, technology, history, architecture…can you imagine what that would look like? No? You have to see it with your eyes to know what I’m talking about.

Day ended with Chicago’s most amazing pizza’s at Giordano’s. Just what we needed at the end of a hard day’s job.