Chicago! 2012

I got home last night from Chicago, which over the last few years has definitely earned its place as one of my favorite cities in the world. I was in town to visit my best friend Charlie, although he kept joking that I was just crashing with him while on a business trip. The photo of Charlie below is the only one I managed to capture snow falling in, and let me tell you, I got pretty excited about that snow, because my feeling is that if I’m going to be really cold, there might as well be snow around.

Charlie works in the specialty-coffee-industry (at least 80% of my rediculous-coffee-snobbishness can be directly attributed to him) and his killer home coffee bar was recently featured in the Chicago Reader.

The trip mainly consisted of large quantities of all of my favorite things: eating, walking, talking, and drinking (of coffee, tea, and booze.) Highlights included: getting majorly overly-spiced (in a good way) at Lao Hunan (pictured directly above), getting to sit in on an espresso QC meeting with Charlie & his coworkers (second photo from top), great meals with two different Chicago-based clients, and an amazing dinner at the home of Cindy & Julia of Crafty Broads, the guest list of which included the really lovely Chicago-based wedding photographers Christy Tyler and Emilia of Emilia Jane Photography (I also had drinks earlier in the week with Emilia and her adorable husband Wil at The Violet Hour, one of my favorite bars in the world.)

Thanks Chicago! Next time let’s maybe work on not being so cold.

(also, a note: I typically shoot film when I travel, and all of the photos in this post are unretouched SLR shots. I did not super love the black & white film I used, and need to remember what it was so that I don’t buy it again.)