We had the best time celebrating the new year in Chicago! We ate great food, saw some great live music and did some shopping. My best friend from high school, Katherine, came with us and it made the trip even better. She's living in Spain right now so we don't get to see her very often so this was the perfect way to hang out for a few days. Her brother and his wife live in Chicago so it worked out perfectly for Katherine to stay with them for a few nights and get to hang out with them too. Her brother, Matt, recently opened up a really cool vintage shop in Chicago called 'Vintage Smith'. He carries mostly men's vintage and also vintage handbags and jewelry that we loved. It was so cool to see his store and talk to him about his business. We even got to see his store room in his house, which RJ said looked surprisingly similar to my 'little collection' in our basement (times 10!). There are more pictures of Matt's store here.
After seeing Matt's store and talking to him, RJ said: 'All that is so you. You could (and should) totally do that." He and I agreed we could see ourselves having a similar vintage clothing store in a few years that also sold vintage records, record players, instruments, etc. He said he would run the register while I went out and shopped for our new stock. Sounds like a good deal to me! Maybe someday and maybe somewhere without snow. (Every winter I say that).
Matt and his wife, Julie, were really great and only live about 10 minutes from Drew and the restaurant. The highlight of our trip for RJ was checking out Matt's music set up he shares with his neighbor in their basement. They disappeared for a few hours until we pulled them back into the real world. On Sunday night we went to Drew's restaurant (the Brown Trout) and had awesome food and wine. On Monday we left Chicago around 11 to head home.
The snow came in right when we were driving home - so getting from Cleveland to Hudson was a little tricky. Luckily the roads cleared up as we were heading further south into our area.
RJ's Chicago-Style pizza:
On New Year's Eve we tried an Ethiopian restaurant that was right around the corner from the Aragon, where we were seeing the concert. It was actually really good!
At the Aragon we saw a band called 'Cage the Elephant'. None of us knew them very well but we all enjoy live (and new) music. We got to see 3 opening bands too, so it was cool to see a few different styles. Much to our surprise, they were serving champagne!
In the picture below I was holding Katherine's drink - not drinking two champagnes at once. That would be a little excessive..
I don't know who this girl is behind us, but it looks like she was having a great time..
At midnight they dropped all those balloons.. it was really cool!
Happy 2012!
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