Hello! We're back from a long end-of-finals, stressful rush and a week-long vacation in Chicago. Before we left, we took our roommate Chiara and her friend Federico, who was visiting from Italy, to Volunteer Park, where we played frisbee and looked at all the fancy plants in the conservatory.

We love the cactus room the best.

We enjoyed the humid warmth before venturing out into the crisp air to the graveyard just on the other side of the park ...

It took a couple of tries for us to find it, but eventually we sought out the graves of Bruce and Brandon Lee.

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For spring break we flew to cold, windy, but sunny Chicago for a week to visit our friend Suzie! Here she is on the evening of our arrival, taking the dog for a walk around her neighborhood. Chicago is full of these 2- and 3-story walkups. They're mostly brick and they lend a really cool feeling to the city.

And what should we find in Chicago but ... Karl Friedrich Schinkel! That's right, a painting of a building he designed is in the Museum of the Art Institute of Chicago. We just can't get away.

Chicago has one of the most gorgeous downtowns I've ever seen. It's clean and it's full of beautiful buildings! Here's the view from the 99th floor of the Sears Tower, where, we discovered, they play "The Entertainer" over and over and over again. (Later, in the stained glass museum, the repeated song of choice was Beethoven's 5th. I wonder if this is a trend.)

A lot of the architecture is from the very early 1900s and it lends a great, Gotham-like character to the city. On the left is the Wrigley buildling, as in the gum people.

I'm sure the beach is really wonderful in the summer when it's warm ... but in March it was quite chilly! Lake Michigan is so big that you can't see the other side. We're told Michigan is over there somewhere though.

Down the street from Suzie's place is Margie's Candies, a classic sundae and candy store from decades ago. Margie has apparently passed on, but her legacy is alive and well and it tastes really really good ...

The inside is really something. There are even mini jukeboxes from the 50s and 60s at each of the tables (they don't work anymore though - a shame).

The ice cream is good, but the best thing about Margie's (besides the incomparable mid-20th-century diner interior) is the hot fudge (in that turreen on the right). We went here three times during our week in Chicago, I'm embarrassed to say, and it's probably good that we live so far away, because otherwise we would get very, very fat.

Schinkel showed up not once, but twice on our trip. Here he is in a caption at the stained glass museum. We're beginning to think we have a calling of some sort ... a Schinkel calling, perhaps ...

On Friday we got to spend the afternoon with Suzie's mom, stopping for lunch at our new favorite lunch place (wish there were one in Seattle), L'Appetito. It's an Italian deli that also serves Illy coffee and gelato! What more could you want?

On our last day we got to hang out with the fabulous Megan, mastermind and bad-high-school-french speaker extraordinaire! We explored her neighborhood, ate awesome nachos, drank Viennese coffee, and had Indian food served by a very garrulous restauranteur, to the tune of an ever-repeating, loudly-playing boy band song. Ah, what a day.

It was fun to spend a week with our good friends, including the furry one ... Natasha, Suzie's adorable dog. Isn't she cute??

When we got back home, spring had arrived! It smells wonderful, and the tulips and forget-me-nots and the gorgeous cherry trees on the UW campus are in bloom. It really is lush here. Too bad it's almost never sunny like in this picture!

It really is stunning to see them all in bloom. Later the petals will start to float through the air and make everything look like a snow globe. :)

Okay, really, this is the last cherry blossom picture. I just think they're so beautiful. Happy Spring, everyone!