Madison and Chicago: a mustard museum, a zoo, and the Bean

At the end of July 2017 we reached Madison, Wisconsin. On the first day we didn't have time to really see the city, so we drove around it the next day.

Mustard museum

The first thing we did after arriving in Madison was go to the mustard museum. The National Mustard Museum is in Middleton, a suburb of Madison, and it displays a large collection of mustards.

A long row of floor-to-ceiling wooden shelves packed with jars and bottles of mustard — Mustard museum, July 2017

There's a game there: you toss a ring onto a jar of mustard, and whichever one you ring, you take home. I threw three times but never landed a single one.

Alexandra, seen from behind, tosses a ring at a table of mustard bottles by a yellow wall with a sign for the game — Ring toss at the mustard museum, July 2017

Meanwhile Pavel was having fun with coloring pages.

Pavel at a round wooden table coloring a picture with a marker — Coloring pages at the mustard museum, July 2017

Zoo

The next day we went to a great zoo. This beautiful bird is a turaco: it runs and hops around nimbly but flies poorly.

A green bird with a crest, a red beak, and a red ring around its eye sits on a branch behind the enclosure mesh — Turaco at the Madison zoo, July 2017

There were also capybaras, marmosets (tiny little monkeys), polar bears, an anaconda, snakes, turtles, and meerkats.

A polar bear swims in the enclosure pool along a stone ledge — Polar bear, July 2017

At least we got to see grizzlies at the zoo. True, they were small and thin; in the wild, grizzlies are much bigger and more powerful. Or maybe these were still very young.

Badger at the zoo, July 2017

A science town

Overall, Madison feels like a science town: there are lots of research centers here. We went to the geology institute and the small museum attached to it. There we saw a room where fossils are studied, an ion spectrometer, and rocks under ultraviolet light.

Shelves of minerals in the dark: the rocks glow bright green, red, yellow, and blue — Rocks under ultraviolet light, geology museum, July 2017

We also went to the botanical garden and swam in a pond near Madison. It's a bit like Meshchera, only more picturesque and cleaner, everything is better organized, and of course there are camping spots too.

From Madison we went to Milwaukee, where an American couple hosted us. And we spent just one day walking around Chicago before moving on.

Bahá'í temple

Remember the Lotus Temple in India? It's a Bahá'í temple: the Bahá'í faith in a way unites all existing religions. The Bahá'ís believe in one God, and a believer of any religion can come to pray in their temple. There's a temple like that in a suburb of Chicago too, in Wilmette. It was completed in 1951 and dedicated in 1953.

A white round temple with a lacy dome and columns, with a trimmed lawn, bushes, and a fountain in front — Bahá'í temple in Wilmette, August 2017

It's a beautiful round, symmetrical building. You can't take photos inside, to preserve the sanctity of the place. And you can't talk there either: it's completely silent inside so as not to disturb anyone.

By train to downtown

The Chicago suburbs are very pleasant: neat, green, with pretty, well-kept houses. But the outskirts of Chicago itself are not so pleasant: trash, dirt, shabby run-down houses, broken roads.

Parking here is a nightmare: in 2017 a spot downtown cost $30 an hour. So we left the car on the outskirts, in a parking lot by a metro station (in 2017 they charged $2 for 12 hours there), and took the train downtown. For getting around, people here buy a card that can be used to pay for more than just fares. In 2017 it cost $5, but after activation that money was credited to its balance.

A wooden elevated station platform under an old iron canopy; passengers wait on the next platform as a train pulls in — Chicago's elevated metro, August 2017

The metro here is worse than in Seattle: shabby, old, lots of spiders, although the cars themselves are perfectly fine. And it isn't an underground metro either, but a train running above the streets.

The Bean and the lake

Downtown we of course went to Chicago's famous bean, the sculpture Cloud Gate, which because of its shape got the nickname The Bean. We also walked by Lake Michigan: there were geese walking around the lakefront park.

Pavel sits on the grass by the water with his back to the camera, looking across the lake at the Chicago skyscrapers — Lake Michigan, August 2017

There's also a cool fountain there, Crown Fountain. It shows the faces of ordinary city residents: every now and then a face purses its lips, and a jet of water shoots out of its mouth. And in Millennium Park there was a “Spanish Guitar” concert, which of course we went to.

At ten in the evening there were still quite a lot of cars on the roads. Our way then lay through Cleveland to Niagara Falls.