A windy city ...

So, suddenly I remember what if feels like to be cold. Ever since moving to the south of France, I have been telling people I am a proud Canadian who has unfortunately become allergic to Canadian winters. Now the story makes sense again.

I got into Chicago last night and the wind was blowing fierce. How fierce? The local ABC affiliate reported that one young man was crushed under a roof that got blown off a building, a hundred billboards were toppled and trees lost their branches across the city. In more clinical terms, the temperature, with wind chill, was something like 3 degrees, which is in Fahrenheit, which, if my calculations are correct, makes for minus 79 Celsius. This kind of cold makes every minute outside unpleasant. My muscles ached from tensing, my ear froze, my teeth hurt. But the amazing thing … well, there are two.

First, despite all this torturous wind, this isn’t the reason for the city’s nickname. Chicago is called the Windy City because of all the corrupt politicians who have blown hot wind here. The name apparently dates back to the 1920s. Three separate Chicogoans, all huddled against this vile cold wind, told me this story in an ‘Isn’t that ironic’ sort of way.

And the second amazing thing is that I absolutely love Chicago despite my physical discomfort. Everyone I have met, everything I have visited, it all feels tremendously real. It has got me thinking of that old saying about how adversity builds character. If you live in a tough place, whether it be my town of Marseille with its poverty and crime, or a place like Chicago with its six months of hard weather, it takes a little fortitude to endure it. That fortitude makes for strong and interesting people. Though I love places like Paris, I think that for the mainstream population, the city is too easy to create real characters, that the BoBos who thrive there end up like those damn hollow chocolate Easter bunnies, real sweet and alluring on the surface, but when you really push, nothing inside.

Of course, my opinion of Chicago might be affected by the fact that within two hours of my arrival, I was in perhaps the best bar of my life. The joint is called the Green Mill, it is a jazz bar that has been operating continuously since 1907, it has booths and a real stand up bar and mirrors and four types of bourbon and music that makes you want to spend your whole life in one of those booths drinking that bourbon.