My Friend Tina

This past weekend, one of my best friends came to visit me in Chicago.

In the spirit of protecting her delicate identity, I will refer to her as Tina Fey. 

(Seriously, she looks so much like Tina Fey.)

It took a while for me to find her on the corner of Washington and LaSalle.  She wandered there from the train station and hung out in the Einstein Bagels, and then when I got there she’d gone across the street, so I spent a few minutes pacing outside Einstein’s and wondering if she’d been kidnapped.

But then she saw me and came back.  We had a tearful reunion.

And we had a great weekend!

We went to Chinatown and bought trinkets.

We saw the holiday train at the Jackson red line stop.  There were lights and a Santa and excitement.

Great shot, right?

We got very cold and stopped at Corner Bakery for coffee and defrosting our fingers.

We got warm again and went to the Bean at Millennium Park.

We saw the Marilyn Monroe statue.  Marilyn had snow on her dress.

We bumped into way too many people on State Street.

We went to Daley Plaza and the Christmas market, which personally I found a little boring except for these birds:

We went to the Sears Tower (NOT Willis Tower, as it would insist to be called these days).  Tina called her mom and was like GUESS WHERE I AM!  NO, NOT CHINATOWN!  GUESS!

Here we are on the skydeck:

Okay, not a great picture, you can't see a thing, it was dark and raining, don't judge.

We went to dinner at Elephant and Castle.

We watched Bridesmaids, and my life became complete.

…And all of that was just Saturday.

Sunday was fun, too.  Tina and I saw The Descendants with George Clooney and I had to bite down hard on my tongue to keep from bursting into tears.  What a sad and beautiful movie.  My god, I can’t even describe.  Also I dropped all my popcorn on the ground.

We also got super lost on our way back to the train station Sunday night and ended up walking something like 16 blocks in the cold and dark, and by the time we reached Union Station we were exhausted and starving and grumpy.  Somehow we were able to avoid getting hit by trucks, stumbled into a sports bar, and ate and drank everything we could ever want.  Tina made me get a cab home.  Ahem.

A word about friends: the ones who ride Amtrak from the smutty old station in Erie, PA to visit you in Chicago, who get up with you at 6 AM because you have to go to work on Friday and don’t want to leave them all alone in your apartment, who wait patiently on a dead college campus while you’re at work, who don’t get mad when you can’t follow directions and end up dragging them all over the more god-forsaken parts of the city, who leave town Sunday night on same smutty train because they have to go to work at 8 AM after a night of fitful, chilly sleep…those are friends worth having.

Tina Fey is one of those friends.

Here we are having fun together.

The End.