Guest author: Victor Donkov
Chicago: the Onion Connection
Photo: Victor Donkov (Chicago, US, 2009)
A friend – Victor Donkov (on this photo) just came from a trip to Chicago, US. His brilliant story starts as a personal experience with a lively sense of humour, turns into a tourist information guide and ends before it gets worse and the onion rots 🙂
Here is his full story with more photos (in pdf).
Rayn@'s Spot 
November 18, 2009 at 14:10
Greetings from Chicago where I live for four years now.
Excellent story and guide. Congratulations to the author!
Here is the link to the referred-to The Onion’s media – http://www.theonion.com/content/index
November 18, 2009 at 21:00
@V. Donkov (Author! Author!) – many thanks once again for the pleasurable reading.
@M.McDowall – thanks for the link. I’ve been to some other places in the US, but not Chicago. Will put on my ‘to visit’ list 🙂
November 19, 2009 at 00:34
It is true that Chicago is a real surprise when you visit it first.
I was there first in 1996. I loved it but I thought that I will never come back. I still remember that I took a board trip and I was impressed by the comment why Gleacher center has no windows from the back.
Some 10 years later I started attending the London campus of Chicago Booth. In 2008 I was back in Chicago for my electives and I took the same trip. Would you believe it? When passing by the Gleacher center the guide said exactly the same words!
November 19, 2009 at 01:30
@Katerina Maximova: Kate, this is On Max – https://tzvetkova.wordpress.com/2009/03/27/on-max/ – challenging to guess. What did the guide say?
November 19, 2009 at 11:30
An interesting and amazing guide on Chicago and America overall. As the auther mentioned, winters are severe there. I visited Chicago in late November. It was windy and freezingly cold… hence I remember the beauty of the huge lake, the strange (for me as Bulgarian) site of skyskrapers located at one side of it… and the feeling of wind and cold and the desire to escape… For New York the same is valid, one doesn’t feel a foreigner. Everyone is from somewhere, and proudly says “I am an Italian”… though he does not know a word Italian. Bulgarians say “I am a European”… otherwise too complicated to explain, where Bulgaria is. I remember saying “I am from Bulgaria”… and I got an anwer “Oh, really!”… the american polite way to say “Where the hell is that…” or “Who cares”.
There was a thought, if you cross the ocean once, you are never on one side of it only… in America I missed home… back in Bulgaria I missed the diversity for a while… those type of feelings never disappear, just alleviate over time. My own experience, the “missing home” feeling hurts more.