After lunch, we continued to explore Macy's, reading in one area the history of Marshall Field's which ironically talked about continuing the tradition (yeah, right up until Macy's buys you and wipes 100+ years of history out!) Then we see a sign leading to the "Narcissus Room". We walk on over and see this banquet room with a fountain in the middle (I'm guessing that is the source of the name Narcissus.) In the fountain are all these huge ornaments and behind the fountain is another "Santa setting", but with no Santa. Very cool! There were a couple families taking their own photos and I guess it was set up for people to take their own holiday photos. There was an employee wandering though at one point and they didn't chase anyone out, so I assume it was allowed. Anyway, we took some photos (again, click on the image to enlarge them):
After our impromptu photo shoot, we went on down through the floors, ending in the make-up section on the main floor. They tell us about stores across the street. Stores accessible by a top-secret passage down the stairs and through an underground walkway. OK, maybe not top-secret, because there is an "L" train station in the middle, more likely millions of people are aware of this, but it felt like a cool discovery to us. (It's called the "Pedway", I discovered after Googling tonight! LOL) So across the street on State Street is a new mall! It is still growing, at the moment it is almost 3 floors, it's called Block 37. There is a new Disney, Sephora, some restaurants, and more. We got some makeup at Sephora, visited the Disney Store and then headed back across the street to look at the windows at Macy's. Now when it was Marshall Fields, the windows were famous for the magical Christmas scenes and stories that they depicted. Sadly, Macy's did not keep up the tradition. It was only 2/3rds of the windows and they were ads for their Christmas ornaments (they passed it off as a fund raiser - a whopping 10% of the profits, were being donated to Make-a-Wish foundation. Oooohhhh... a whole 10%!!) There was ornaments by Rachel Ray, Jessica Simpson, Donald Trump, Emeril Lagasse, Marth Stewart, Tommy Hilfiger, Sean John, Michael Kor, Betsey Johnson and about 14 all together. Only Rachel Ray and Jessica Simpson had ornaments worth buying, maybe Emeril's chef hat. The rest were uninspired (their signatures on a glass ball! ohh, that's talent!), ugly or boring. (Seriously, Donald Trump? Whose brilliant idea was that?!?) The artwork in the windows was ugly and simplistic (these "elves" looked like a hand drawn face on a felt body that I could have made at my kitchen table.) The story strange and ultimately disappointing. There were others standing around, all expressing their disbelief at how bad it was and their disappointment at the windows. Here I found a photo of the ornaments (click on the image to go to an article about the ornaments):
Next, we grab a cab and go to Filene's Basement on Michigan Avenue across from the John Hancock and Water Tower Place. They are having yet another going-out-of-business sale (this time it looks real.) We stopped by Water Tower Place mall for a while, stopping for a quick snack at The American Girl Place (we'd seen the new store only the month prior, previously we'd gone to their former location a couple blocks over), then some shopping then we tried the steamed dumplings at WowBao. We'd never tried them so we got 2, 1 teriyaki chicken and 1 spicy kung pao chicken. Yummy, we'll try them again! :)This is the view from the ground floor next to WowBao and right by the entrance to Macy's.
After this we stopped into the Disney Store on Michigan Avenue, then the Apple Store and the huge Forever 21. Then another cab ride to Little Italian Village for dinner. We ate upstairs in the 'village', very lovely! After dinner, another cab back to the train station, (we just made our train by less than 2 minutes!) and then on to home. We passed part of the time watching Monte Carlo that we had uploaded the digital copy onto my iPhone (Melanie's very smart idea!) and we snuggled, with each of us having one ear piece to listen to the movie. We rolled back into our town about 9:15 and were we ever tired. As I said, a very memorable day. :)Thanks for reading! I'll try to get a scrapbook freebie ready to share for a new post.
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