It’s early evening, and Manuel, a local lawyer friend, has met me at the Duke of Perth, one of Chicago’s two Scottish bars. It’s famed for its weekly All You Can Eat Fish and Chips. On our way to the beer garden, we pass a once mighty stag’s head on the wall. The addition of […]
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Peacock’s Improved Double Dissection
I hop on a ferry to Navy Pier and head to the Chicago River. It’s time to experience another watery wonder of Chicago. As I stand in line with the hordes waiting by Michigan Avenue Bridge, Docent Rebecca Dixon smiles her way along the line, asking people where they’re from. She stops when she hears […]
Aquariums I Have Known
Along the brim of Lake Michigan, a seemingly infinite number of security guards patrol the area on Segway motorized scooters. Perhaps it just looks like they’re omnipresent because of all the reflective surfaces around Millennium Park. It seems that whatever angle I look into the gleaming mirrored “Cloud Gate” sculpture, or “the Bean,” as it’s […]
The Only Kelpie on the Block
Dominic, a Filipino-American in Chicago for business, tells me at the buffet about how his people congregate in communities in the U.S. and asks me why don’t Scots do this. Why don’t we? Is it the Scottish Way to skulk off alone? To get absorbed into a new country? It seems we did congregate back […]
The Ninth-Biggest Island in the World
By a coffee machine in a hotel in Chicago, I talk to a Hair Designer from Vegas. His hair rises in a four-inch-high, determinedly chestnut pompadour and he is wearing an inadvisably tight, sequin-studded sweatshirt that is remarkably similar to one I once unsuccessfully attempted to dress an unimpressed tabby in. The Hair Designer is […]
The Hebrides Do Not Make Me Think of Leeks
It’s early evening, and Manuel, a local lawyer friend, has met me at the Duke of Perth, one of Chicago’s two Scottish bars. It’s famed for its weekly All You Can Eat Fish and Chips. On our way to the beer garden, we pass a once mighty stag’s head on the wall. The addition of […]
