We can run, but we can't hide...

Chicago, 8pm local time, having tried a while ago Giordano's famous "deep dish" pizza. I was naive enough to go without having made a table reservation, but I was damn lucky, as there was ONE table available. A cheerful girl came and took my order. "It will take about 35 minutes", she told me all too naturally. Seeing my face expression which screamed out loud "how long?!!!", she was quick to explain that in such a busy place, this is how long it takes for an order to be delivered. I acted like a good patient boy (in a rare moment of wisdom I put in my small daypack just before leaving my hostel room, Bill Bryson's book, the one I have been reading since San Diego, "The Lost Continent", do-do-do read it if you are planning on a trip to the US). I got a "small", 10 inches pizza, which comes in six pieces. Three of those are now resting peacefully in my all too content stomach. The other three are getting cold in the pack the same cheerful girl prepared for me, seeing me hopelessly trying to finish up the pizza, which proved to be... should I say "filling"? It would be too poor a word. More like "ooooh myyyyy Gooood, how can ONE person eat alone SUCH a pizza?!" For 15 dollars you don't just have dinner, you do one of the musts while in Chicago. No kidding... Eating a "deep dish" pizza is one of the musts, as you would see if you were with me this morning at the gift shop right at the bottom of the John Hancock Building. You have t-shirts with Al Capone's face, others with "The Windy City" written on them, others with the city's professional sports teams, and you also have t-shirts explaining in 50 words what a "deep dish" pizza is. I'm telling you, having a deep dish pizza at Giordano's in Chicago, is like visiting the Eiffel Tower in Paris. You don't get to shoot a hundred photos, but you do get a couple of kilos heavier (picture me with my belly looking as if I am five months' pregnant with my pants' button, of course, unbuttoned). As for the Hancock Building, the girl working at the ticket's booth warned me, as I was handing her my twelve bucks, that because of the weather, from the building's observation deck I wouldn't be able to see anything (it was so cloudy today in Chicago that from the street level you couldn't see the top floors of the city's highest skyscrapers). The girl saved me 12 dollars. I didn't go up. Technically though, I did go to the Hancock Building (its bottom). Does it count?
I arrived at Chicago at 7:30 in the morning, having taken a four hours' flight from Oakland, "baby" San Francisco. I spent five days at "Frisco", and saving you from the torture of reading an endless hymn of mine to the city, all I'll say is that I "dared" compare it to Melbourne. Quick explanation: Melbourne = the city where Yours Truly would love to be living right now, the city I would fly to defend if one day, say... the Chinese attacked and the locals were in hopeless need of a helping hand to save their city from becoming a Chinese colony. Yes, I liked San Francisco that much. Its streets, its distinct neighborhoods, the general feeling you get while wandering around, its bookstores, its cool CD stores, even the ruthless hills that brought me to my knees more than once or twice. I have to go back to San Francisco one day, and this time it should be summertime...
Tomorrow morning I am flying to Munich where I will have to spend almost ten hours before flying to Thessaloniki, home. The trip has come pretty much to an end. I could write a book about everything I saw, about things I did, a good number of chapters would be dedicated to things I didn't do, but all in all I am glad I came. For two reasons. First because, simply put, I spent time in great places. San Diego, Tijuana, LA, San Francisco, Chicago, I consider myself lucky... Second, because I came to realize something I already knew, either way. We can all run from things troubling us, but we can't hide. We really can't hide. We can fool ourselves, we can pretend not to have something in our mind, but if you think about it, closing our eyes to reality is like using a credit card to pay for everything we buy, never handing over cash to anyone, but also never going to the bank to pay the credit card's monthly bill. Just because you don't pay your bill doesn't mean that the bank will be charitable enough to "forgive" you. The bank will "remember" you next month as well, and then the bill will only be way bigger, because taxes will have been added. It's a nasty circle, and it takes guts to break out. Guts, my friends... Lucky they who have them. God save us who don't...