A cold Thanksgiving day in DC--a thought about Chicago

Like any yuppie, I was walking home from Starbucks in DC and sipping a peppermint mocha, enjoying the stroll in my highly urban Glover Park neighborhood, when I smelled the diesel of a passing bus, heard the honking of a few cars, saw people walking on the sidewalk huddled due to the cold, and felt a few snowflakes land on my face. That's when I realized, this is very much a CHICAGO moment. What often defines the blunt, in-your-face urban experience of Chicago is often what many of us, whether we realize this openly or not, love about the city. It's this antithesis of the yawning sunbelt realm that drives us to love the city even more. But Chicago takes industrial/cold/urban misery to the extreme that no other city can match, and that is what many of us, including me, love so much about it. My girlfriend is from California and knows how much I love Chicago, and I have made it clear to her that Chicago is one of the places we'll eventually live. She is going there in January to interview for jobs, and I find this to be a peculiar situation. On one hand, I dread the fact that it will be so cold, and surely this will kill her desire to EVER come to this part of the country. But another part of me takes a dark pleasure in the fact that here is a sheltered California girl who will be subjected to the bone-chilling ice cold, the smell of diesel and exhaust, the bustling streets, and the roar of the unforgiving El while walking to and from her downtown interview. Nothing pleases me more than the thought of one of those comfortable sunbelt-types being forced out of their car and being subject to a real northeastern-style urban environment. Sunbelters aside, there is so much to enjoy about real northeastern/old union style urban environments, but Chicago really takes it to that next level. It's even a bit colder than New York, and its downtown trains mostly run above ground. Downtown Chicago in the winter exemplifies the urban experience to me better than any other place I can think of. And that is why, walking in the cold this morning and smelling those diesel fumes, I could think of no other place.>