Two guys behind me in line at the bakery this morning were talking about their exploits at Lollapalooza last night,. I think they were already or still drunk. I like this city.

I’ve just finished cleaning up my hotel room and am killing the little bit of time I have before I need to go catch the commuter train out to the burbs to see my brother and sister-in-law and my baby niece Amelia. It doesn’t seem like I’ve only been in the Chicago for about two and a half days. There was the conference, of course, taking up the bulk of my daytime hours and confining me to beige conference rooms that could have been in any hotel anywhere. Outside the Hilton, the city really did make me catch my breath sometimes.

Technically, I live in a city. I lived downtown in Saint Louis for a year, on the twelfth floor of an apartment building half a block off the street where the urban revitalization project was just beginning to attract the hipsters and the yuppies were eyeballing the condo developments and the recent new branch of Good Works contemporary furniture right off the main drag. The streest were quiet during the day.

I think I was a little ahead of the game; after I decided I wanted to pay less money for more space and moved to the south part of the city, the boom happened. Washington Avenue is synonymous with trendy nightlife; the side streets teem with condos in converted warehouses. All the things that weren’t close by when I was there – a grocery store, a selection of independent coffee shops and bakeries, eclectic boutiques, a pharmacy – fill the ground-floor windows. The block-to-block patchiness has mostly disappeared in that section of town. My old apartment building is now closed for construction, and banners announce a new condominium community coming in 2009.

And yet what I was raised to call a city is nothing like this city. I’m twenty-seven years old, I’ve traveled, I’ve been in big cities here and abroad, and yesterday I hailed a cab for the first time. It was an unbelievably heady feeling. I walked about a mile and a half on Michigan Avenue the other day, not to shop, but to get from my conference back to my hotel. Streets are rarely a pedestrian thoroughfare in Saint Louis. If all we need to do is get from Point A to Point B, we drive. I live about one mile from my favorite Mexican restaurant and from my neighborhood Walgreens, and I’ve never walked to either one. I don’t think I’d ever do it alone. My neighborhood is not bad, but no one else is walking and safety in numbers is not a cliche.

Last night I went to a Chicago blogger meetup, and we ate at a restaurant and walked a few blocks to a bar afterward. At 11:30, we went our separate ways, to trains and apartments and in my case, a hotel. I was surrounded by respectable-looking people on the sidewalks everywhere I went. You can walk in The Loop in Chicago at night.

The fact that I am amazed by these things that are likely taken for granted by people in big cities everywhere is not because I grew up in a small town. I think it’s because I live in a city that is not a city. Cities on television and in the movies show people out walking all the time. Everyone walks to work, to the shops, to wherever they need to go. Scary things only happen on dark side streets, and people who do not come from cities expect this and clutch their fanny packs as soon as the sun goes down. People who come from a city like Saint Louis do the same. We’re not used to the idea of walking the city at night. And while I’m sure that’s probably the safest policy in most cities, fanny packs excluded and Chicago included, the fact that Wabash between Lake and Randolph was comfortably lit and peopled with respectable pedestrians close to midnight didn’t even give me pause until I got back to my hotel and realized that I was in The City On TV.

I’ve also just realized that this is the first time I’ve visited a city on my own for purposes other than tourism. I had places to go and set times to be there. I had to go to work. I had friends to meet, to do the sorts of social things that you do where you live, not where you travel. Maybe that makes me see this city differently than I ever saw London or Houston or Denver… or even Chicago on previous trips. It’s friendlier, more livable, more comfortable and more in keeping with the idea of what it should be like to exist in a city that IS a city. It makes me not want to go home just yet.

But if you’ll excuse me, I have to catch a train to Arlington Heights. If the baby doesn’t drool on my keyboard, I’ll come back and tell you the funny stories instead of boring you with my metropolitan musings. There are boys involved, and no matter what city I’m in, I like those too.

Oh HELL yeah!

http://movies.msn.com/movies/article.aspx?news=294827&gt1=7701

Robert Redford is taking on Bill Bryson’s “A Walk In the Woods” (one of the best books ever. EVER.) for an upcoming film project.

I have faith in Robert Redford as an actor and a director, and I have to say I’m quite pleased that it’s him of all people. Please Jesus let him do it justice. And Robert – have no mercy casting Stephen Katz.

I don’t know what kind of person I’m becoming, but it appears to be the kind who sits in a coffee shop and blogs instead of going out and interacting with real people. Of course, some people who do that end up getting a TV show and a spot on Celebrity Rap Superstar. I’m not talking about Kendra Wilkinson.

I picked up a Bill Bryson book today.

Bill Bryson is my favorite writer. If you’ve not experienced any of his delightful books, drop everything and do so immediately. Here, take my car.

I am one of those oddball People Who Read For Fun. In fact, I am in that still odder subset, People Who Read For Fun and Intellectual Betterment. That’s PWRFFIB, which is approximately the sound most people make when puffing out their cheeks and scoffing at me. PWRFF in my demographic (SWF, 20s) tend to believe that Intellectual Betterment is not fun. Books that make you smarter are for school. Fun books are pink and have lively sketches of martini glasses, shopping bags, and/or high heels on the covers. (I confess to a meager stash of these pink books, but I hide them the way most married men hide their porn.) Many PWRFF tend to believe that Fun and Intellectual Betterment are mutually exclusive.

Bill Bryson’s books are fun. They will also make you smarter.

Bill Bryson is a native Iowan who moved to England on a whim at the age of twenty, married an English girl, and raised his family on that lovely island for twenty years before hauling them all across the pond to Hanover, New Hampshire in the mid-nineties. He is neither slick nor erudite, a rather charming amalgam of American small-town simplicity and British droll. The magic in his writing is that despite his many years as a journalist and best-selling author, despite his extensive travel around the globe and his cranium packed with more fact and lore than you or I could ever hope to absorb, Bill Bryson is perpetually wide-eyed, curious, and quite often puzzled. As he seeks to educate himself about his chosen topic, he will inadvertently educate you while you are laughing yourself stupid.

His twenty years in the land of the Queen’s English have given Bryson a few quirks, like an appreciation for scones and milky tea, and a peculiar pickiness about pubs. (Americans just like a place to drink, period. Bonus points if there are TVs and girls present.) And yet despite his insider status in that nation, Britain is just as much a puzzling place to him as the land of his birth. This is what makes Notes From a Small Island a great book. The fact that he had only ever learned to pay taxes, purchase a home, work with a lawyer, and perform other grown-up chores in England made life after his return to America similarly troublesome. This is what makes I’m a Stranger Here Myself a great book. The wilderness is another source of bewilderment. This is what makes A Walk In the Woods one of my favorite books ever. EVER.

Right now I am re-reading (for these are the sorts of books you should re-read) In a Sunburned Country, Bryson’s account of his travels in Australia. In following Bryson’s bumblings and bumping along the Boomerang Coast and the outback, I have been thoroughly entertained and sneakily educated. This is the wily man’s trick: He will lure you in with a humorous anecdote about confused old people on the side of the road and wind up telling you about the history of the Great Western Highway through the Blue Mountains and how the developers could have saved a lot of time and trouble if they’d followed the cows to find the mountain pass. This is how it begins… trivia, history, local lore, and of course, his personal opinions on hotels, urban planning, and the peculiarity of Australian names like Boomahnoomoonah and Tittybong. (These are real places.) Before you know it, you’re searching Expedia for tickets to Mullumbimby instead of Sydney.

Bryson’s observations and research encompass the culture of the places in which he travels, from politics to pastiche, as well as the travel experience itself. Take, for example, this passage from In a Sunburned Country, in which he hears a cricket match on the radio and contemplates the oddities of the game of cricket and its presence in Australia.

No, the mystery of cricket is not that Australians play it well, but that they play it at all. It has always seemed to me a game much too restrained for the rough-and-tumble Australian temperament. Australians much prefer games in which brawny men in scanty clothing bloody each other’s noses. I am quite certain that if the rest of the world vanished overnight and the development of cricket were left in Australian hands, within a generation the players would be wearing shorts and using the bats to hit each other. And the thing is, it would be a much better game for it.

You now have a much clearer picture of Australia than ever before. This is travel literature at its finest.

Read your first Bill Bryson book (now) and you will have inadvertently become one of the PWRFFIB. You’ll know more useful things about Australia (or England, or the Appalachian Trail, or Africa, or Western Europe*) than any Rough Guide or Lonely Planet book could impart. Don’t tell me you need to know the names of 47 hotels and 32 museums in Melbourne and what days they offer senior discounts. You need to know that representatives from Melbourne and Sydney practically came to blows in 1901 when the nascent Commonwealth of Australia needed to choose a capital city, each believing that his city should be given the honor, resulting in an impasse that led the Parliament to simply build a new city (Canberra) halfway between Melbourne and Sydney in order to keep the peace.

You have probably had some sort of fun while reading this. And you have probably just learned something new**. GOTCHA!

*In a Sunburned Country, Notes from a Small Island, A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson’s African Diary, and Neither Here Nor There, respectively.

**If you knew all this stuff already, pat yourself on the back and go away.