Daaaaa Brauts!!!

Uncle Bubba has made his way to a most obscure place for a good ol' southern boy in winter; he's in the greater Chicagoland area. In the approaching inclement cold he finds himself even further from home, as misplaced as a back pocket on a t-shirt. But, he has a job in a bad economy and has learned, in his gruff and sometimes grumbling way to appreciate the subtleties of his often forced adventures; this time in northern Illinois. For the most part, outside of the ghettos, the area has a different vibe--it's almost mundane. There's a myriad of sprawling suburbs each having the air of a small town and seemingly detached inkling of the rest of the world. Bubbie noticed some intriguing examples of this, one of which he relayed to me...

It's unfathomable that hordes of husky heartlanders will stand on line, out the door--a revolving door--in cold windy weather to have a doggone hotdog! Dat's right; and in their own unique vernacular, when made with sausage it's a sassage sammich. They love their Italian Beef sammich, a local delicacy consisting of piles of spicy sliced meat in a perilously soggy bun and let's not forget Daaa Brauts! If you haven't figured it out by now, the Chicago area is, incidentally, a culinary cornucopia. As a matter of fact, in a hotel lobby he picked up a Chicago tourist guide of the best and hottest places displayed 35 of 40 pages hawking restaurants. Bubbie swears that when he lays in his hotel bed at night and the howl of the wind dies down he can hear the distant hardening of arteries.

Bubbie has forever heard of Chicago as the windy city. Often upon hearing it he admits to thinking sarcastically, "Yea right; you're in the North, its cold, what do you expect." But now that he has spent a few wintery weeks living like a native, he admits that the relentless wind has a significant stinging bite, no matter how light or how heavy. At times it hurts, it makes a colder, tougher go of things. But you don't hear the locals speak of it, they don't complain about the cold.

The landscape is relatively flat. He reckons that short of the plethora of near empty glass and steel office buildings there's nothing to stop the cold Canadian air from sweeping down yonder. Who knows, but in Bubbie's view the wind in the windy city is as viscious as a Sarah Palin with a hot-flash.