Unused vacation days were about to expire, so I threw on a grocery tote and spent a long weekend in Chicago. Predictably, everything went wrong in ways I did not predict.
Nothing ran on time
I have not taken that many international flights, but my personal delay rate might be close to 80 percent. I have already claimed flight-delay insurance twice. This time, since the trip was domestic, I thought I had found a smart solution: train out, plane back. The logic seemed sound. Trains depart on schedule, arrival times should be more manageable, and I could finally try the long-distance Lake Shore Limited route.
In reality, the train was four hours late and the flight was delayed by half an hour. Neither managed to be punctual, but the train was the real masterpiece. On travel day I saw thunderstorms in the forecast and assumed that, if anything, the flight would be the problem. Instead, lightning brought down a tree, the tree landed on the tracks, and it took four hours for American-style emergency response to clear and repair the line. I ended up waiting in Albany for almost five hours before even boarding.
Once I got on, the projected delay had dropped to around three hours, which sounded survivable. Then I woke up from a nap and discovered we were still four hours behind. It was not that the train was especially slow. It was the other classic American rail experience: passenger service yielding to freight. Tickets on this route cost more than flying, but paying more does not make passenger rail a priority. The train would simply stop mid-journey, wait for freight traffic to pass, then start moving again. And when American trains do pick up speed, the ride becomes thrilling in the wrong way. It was bumpy enough to feel like a roller coaster.
The reason is simple enough. Passenger rail is less profitable, and in a system driven by returns, freight wins. The kind of passenger-first logic that people take for granted elsewhere often operates at a loss. Heavy-haul rail, by contrast, makes economic sense. The same pattern shows up at sea: passenger liners have all but disappeared from the Atlantic and Pacific, while cargo ships remain the dominant choice. Profit decides what survives.
This route does have sleepers, but the prices are impressive in the least flattering sense—well over a thousand dollars. The regular seats, though, are spacious, more like a soft sleeper than anything on a plane, with enough legroom to stretch out and a recline decent enough for sleeping. No pillow, no blanket, heavy air-conditioning. I used a softshell jacket and neck pillow and managed fine, since I do not need much to sleep. Still, having now tried it, I would choose flying next time.
As for the scenery I had imagined, most station names meant nothing to me, and many of the places looked worn down. After all, the route cuts through the Rust Belt. There were scattered abandoned factories, then vast runs of cornfields. That was the moment I realized the place where I live is not especially rural after all. Huge parts of the Midwest really are empty.
The biggest cost of the delay was not emotional, just practical: a supposedly relaxed itinerary instantly lost four prime hours. I felt worse for the passengers trying to connect onward to San Francisco. Conductors were constantly directing people because the transfer window after arrival was extremely tight. I had no such problem. The second I got out of Union Station, I headed straight to my first stop: the Art Institute of Chicago, where a painting that once shaped my research life was waiting.
The painting I came for
I had previously said in a presentation that the work which inspired my thinking about reactionomics was A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. What I did not know at the time was that the version I had seen elsewhere was only a study. The finished painting is in Chicago, and it is enormous—an entire wall of its own.
The museum has an app with audio commentary, and that was how I learned Seurat's pointillism also began, in a sense, as an experiment. He was studying complementary colors and how color could be produced through dots of pigment. In that light, the painting starts to feel like a 19th-century analog color display, especially with the carefully treated border.
The work depicts the right bank, and nearby there is an earlier piece showing the industrialized left bank. Seeing them together in the same gallery makes the contrast much clearer.
The reason this painting mattered to my own research, however, had nothing to do with color theory. I know very little about art. Looking at a crowded image like that, all I can do is guess at possible relationships—husband and wife, mother and daughter, coworkers, acquaintances—simply from who stands near whom. I do not need to know anyone's name first.
That was the chemistry lesson for me. You do not have to identify every compound in a sample before discussing the reactions happening inside it. Sometimes you can capture reaction-level information directly from mass differences, just as you can infer social relationships from spatial distance in a painting without knowing any biography at all.
Seurat, of course, had no high-resolution mass spectrometry in his era, so he could not possibly have imagined that more than a century later some art-illiterate viewer would be inspired by the scene in this way. And the viewer in question had no idea that Seurat himself had been pursuing color science. Two strangers separated by over a hundred years, talking past each other in different languages, somehow still connecting—that also feels like a form of art.
I really did come to Chicago largely to see this painting with my own eyes. But Chicago is obviously larger than a single canvas.
Deep-dish pizza, hot dogs, and the limits of local legend
Before arriving, I checked what counted as classic Chicago food. The answers were twofold: deep-dish pizza and hot dogs. Or, put more honestly, one is the thing you wait an hour for, and the other is the thing you wait half an hour for.
I ordered deep-dish pizza right after racing through the museum. While waiting, I walked over to Millennium Park and took a look at the Bean. It was Independence Day, so there was a concert in the square. I stood there pretending to appreciate it for a while, then admitted to myself that at my age I could simply accept not understanding certain kinds of performance and move on. After a large loop around the area, I returned to collect the pizza.
Because I had spent the whole previous day on the train living on snacks and fruit, I managed to eat two-thirds of a ten-inch deep-dish pie in one sitting, then finished the rest the next morning. It tasted like perfectly ordinary pizza, just thicker. Nothing life-changing.
The hot dog was better in one respect: the sausage itself was genuinely good. Still, it did not reach the level of revelation. Both foods landed in the category of worth trying because I was there, not because they reordered my understanding of eating.
My throat was a little off during the rest of the trip, but the fix was simple enough: drink more water, buy some vegetable salad, keep cough drops on hand, and rest when possible. City travel is one of the easiest forms of travel there is. The quick-dry towel I packed turned out to be useful mainly for wiping sweat.
Solo travel has very little room for error. Plans almost always get hit by surprises, and the surprises are exactly the things you cannot prepare for in advance. The only real solution is mental: do not turn the trip into a race to complete objectives. If you do that, it starts to feel too much like work.
The Windy City makes more sense from the river
I have visited more than a hundred museums. Across the traditional arts—literature, theater, painting, music, dance, sculpture, architecture—I have seen enough to recognize periods and styles. But I have to admit that I do not truly appreciate art in the emotional sense. My judgments are mostly experiential and memorized, and the works that move me are often not the canonical masterpieces. With architecture I am even more lost.
That is exactly why I would strongly recommend the Chicago architecture river cruise.
The commentary made many buildings suddenly legible to me. There were triangular structures, buildings assembled in stages decades apart, projects designed around ideas of social self-governance, and even an explanation of how Trump Tower uses a stepped form to better fit the surrounding skyline. My favorite was the Y-shaped building at 150 N Riverside Plaza. It grips the riverbank like a tree with roots. And because Chicago is the Windy City, all these skyscrapers have to be engineered against wind-induced sway. That building uses a rooftop water tank so fluid inertia can counteract wind forces; other towers solve the problem through wind channels or tube-like structural systems.
One way I define art is as an excellent object that cannot simply be copied elsewhere. Chicago's architecture fits that definition well. These buildings feel tailored to Chicago itself: individual in style, stamped by their eras, and responsive to local geography and weather.
The history of skyscrapers here spans barely more than a century, interrupted for roughly thirty years by the Great Depression, and yet in just the last four or five years new towers have continued to appear. During the cruise I noticed a relatively open patch of land and could not help thinking that, in a few decades, it too may become another urban laboratory.
Our guide was a local, and during one water break she joked that she was enjoying a local specialty cocktail, a "Michigan special." She also told stories from her own life and spoke about the city with real affection. That kind of belonging feels rarer than it should in modern cities. If your English listening is solid—or if you have one of those live-translation earbuds—the architecture cruise is absolutely worth doing.
I also went to 360 Chicago for the big panoramic view and tried the Tilt attraction. But I am not afraid of heights, so that sort of thing leaves me fairly cold. Architecture was the best entry point into the city for me, though Chicago's history turned out to be just as engaging.
A city museum done right
After enough time in American museums, you begin to experience a strange sameness. On this trip I skipped the aquarium, the planetarium, and the Field Museum. If I want a major aquarium, Atlanta comes to mind. If I want a planetarium, Los Angeles works. For natural history, once you have spent serious time in New York and Washington, the Field Museum becomes easier to pass over.
That is not criticism. Quite the opposite. For people living near Chicago, those three are elite hometown museums. More broadly, many American cities have strong art museums with their own signature masterpieces, but the institutional pattern is often similar: ancient Greece through modern art, recognizable big names, familiar narratives. If your goal is simply to satisfy curiosity, it can make more sense to pick one close to home and explore it deeply. I lived in New York for three years and went to the Met more than ten times, and to the American Museum of Natural History several times too. So now, when I visit another museum of the same type, I tend to drift through it quickly.
I felt something similar before in Beijing, where I visited the National Museum over and over. But provincial museums in China still remain very worth seeing, because unlike many American museums—which necessarily build their early-history collections by gathering objects from other continents—those museums often tell the story of their own province, and that story alone can be compelling. The U.S. does excel, though, at another kind of museum: the city-history museum.
In New York, I used to love dropping into the Museum of the City of New York on weekends. Chicago's story is entirely different, so I made time for the Chicago History Museum by Lincoln Park. There I learned far more than just the 1871 fire. The city began as a fur trading post, then grew through stockyards and furniture manufacturing, later endured the decline of steel, and accumulated layers of gangster history, civil rights activism, two world expositions, the first mail-order catalog, the chain-reaction story behind the birth control pill, Michael Jordan and the Bulls, Chicago theater, jazz, the municipal flag, and even the history of amusement parks in the city.
The museum also pays special attention to Lincoln. He had planned to retire and spend his later years in Chicago, which makes what happened next feel sad in a more personal way.
Chicago's history is not as long as New York's, but it is more than interesting enough. The city comes across as energetic and full of momentum. Lincoln Park also has the only free zoo in the United States, though I did not have time to see it. I can imagine locals loving it.
Chinatown, in several American versions at once
Across the United States, most Chinatowns fit patterns that can already be found in New York.
There is the old Manhattan model: over a century of history, strong local cultural inertia, and Cantonese predominance. Then there is the Sunset Park Eighth Avenue model, shaped mostly by immigrants who arrived during the last two decades of the twentieth century, with Southern Min widely heard. Finally there is the Flushing model, built up over the past twenty years, Mandarin-heavy, with the atmosphere of a small county town in China.
Chinese ethnic enclaves formed for historical reasons, including exclusion and discrimination. Many second-generation residents later moved out through education and upward mobility. In Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, what I have often seen is a Chinatown in gradual decline, usually closer to the Sunset Park model.
Chicago's Chinatown contains traces of all three patterns, though overall it feels more like Eighth Avenue and also includes familiar mainland chain businesses. I made a point of visiting the local Chinatown museum. It has four floors: offices on the third, a library-like space on the fourth, a second floor covering Chinatown history and Chinese American military service, and a first floor that did not seem to be a permanent exhibition space. When I visited, the ground-level exhibition focused on immigrant images in trading cards, which was unexpectedly interesting.
The building had suffered a fire in 2008. Coincidentally, the Museum of Chinese in America in New York also experienced a fire in 2020. I do not know if that means anything, but the parallel is hard not to notice.
This Chinatown also has a Nine-Dragon Wall—nothing on the scale of the one in the Forbidden City, of course—and a small Sun Yat-sen Park. I visited the older Chinatown and did not have time for the others. If you are in Chicago, it is a perfectly good place to have a meal and look around, though the main area is basically just one street. I had minced beef over rice there, and it was good.
A museum of surgery, and an exhibit that irritated me
The International Museum of Surgical Science is distinctive enough to be worth a visit, especially if you are interested in medicine. In spirit it can be compared with the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia.
The museum occupies a single building. The first floor includes a modern-era pharmacy display. The second floor is organized into themed galleries, with a richly enclosed library, statues of notable medical figures, a special exhibition on X-ray equipment and eyeglasses, and paintings about the history of medicine. It is not large, but I still spent about an hour and a half there.
One gallery focused on a surgical association from Taiwan. The presentation made a conspicuous effort to distance itself from China: labeling the Republic of China explicitly as Taiwan, omitting mainland backgrounds and career histories from biographical introductions, and generally turning a medical display into a political statement. I found it petty.
Medicine has no borders, and pathogens certainly do not check passports before deciding whom to infect. If someone insists on this kind of political framing in a medical setting, it makes me wonder what else they allow politics to shape. Personally, anyone who celebrates Lunar New Year, eats dumplings, and writes Chinese characters belongs, in a cultural sense, to the broader Chinese world. States are only one temporary form of human organization. If we ever made contact with extraterrestrials, would nationality really be the first thing worth announcing? We are all carbon-based life forms; much of this division and hostility feels manufactured.
Some ideas simply have nothing to do with human survival and exist mainly to create conflict. To me, Taiwan independence belongs to that category. Nor does this seem like a question that requires military resolution. Both mainland China and Taiwan now face population decline, and it is not hard to imagine both becoming more open to immigration in the coming decades. At that point, places may evolve more toward urban coalitions like New York or Chicago, where no single ethnicity dominates and city-level diversity matters more than national labels. In that future, nationality may matter much less than the city where one actually lives. Many present obsessions may end up looking like attempts to preserve a past that is already gone.
Five hours still was not enough at the Museum of Science and Industry
I spent more than five hours at the Museum of Science and Industry, and it still did not feel like enough. I picked two special exhibitions. The coal mine one was interesting. The World War II submarine exhibit was less impressive to me, especially compared with the nuclear submarine museum in Connecticut, which is also free.
The museum itself occupies a former World's Fair building. In terms of content, it feels like some impossible hybrid: a science center in Connecticut or Boston, plus a space center in Houston, plus a railroad museum in New York or Baltimore, plus a human-biology museum in Shanghai, plus the Cooper Hewitt design museum, plus a children's playground.
That comparison is not meant to say this one museum replaces all the others. Those places each go deeper into their respective specialties. The Chicago museum is just astonishingly broad. Its major galleries also address very current issues like microplastics and climate change. If I lived nearby, I would probably buy an annual membership and keep returning until I had exhausted every detail.
Chicago residents must enjoy museum access nearly on par with New Yorkers. In New York I visited more than thirty museums; here, a handful of institutions can already cover an enormous range, and the quality remains high.
In China, this kind of place would be classified more as a science-and-technology museum. These are comparatively easier to design and build, and they can be tailored to local industries. For a while, "ancient town" tourism became fashionable there, producing endless pseudo-historic modern architecture. Honestly, many places would be better off excavating their industrial strengths and building science-and-industry museums instead, with interactive exhibitions focused on design, craft, and concrete modern problems.
The museum sits near the University of Chicago. I had assumed I would finish in three hours and then stroll around campus. Instead I stayed too long and had to head straight for the airport.
Southwest Airlines and the mystery of the missing seat number
I flew home because taking the train back would not have worked. Since I had already used Chicago's main airport before, I decided to try the smaller one this time. Midway turned out to be essentially a Southwest kingdom.
I had heard of Southwest for years but never flown with them. No first class, no business class, just economy. The pilots are said to like making jokes. On the day I bought my ticket, checked baggage was still free on domestic routes; that policy was canceled right afterward, though it did not affect me much. For a one-week trip, a single backpack is enough anyway.
The most interesting part was that Southwest tickets do not come with assigned seats. Boarding is effectively first come, first served. I did not know that when I booked.
After getting through security, I glanced at my boarding pass and noticed there was no seat number—only a boarding group designation, C36. At that moment I still did not realize this meant I would be among the very last people onto a full flight. There was no real choice involved by then; I ended up in the middle seat of the last row.
I had already checked in on my phone a full two hours before departure, so apparently the 141 passengers ahead of me were all more experienced at this game. In a way, that was fine. I had never sat that far back before. The pilot did, in fact, have a sense of humor, referring to the lavatory as "the laboratory" and reminding everyone not to smoke in the laboratory. I assume every captain keeps a private stash of these lines.
What was actually worth going out of your way for
If I borrowed Michelin's language, three parts of Chicago felt like true three-star experiences—worth a special trip because you cannot quite get the same thing elsewhere: the Art Institute, the architecture river cruise, and the Chicago History Museum.
Most of the other stops have counterparts in other cities. Those three, for me, did not.