Are you a Michi-can or a Michi-can't?

As I never got around to writing anything about our trip to Washington DC for the Rally to Restore Sanity, I thought I should make more of an effort for our recent trip to Michigan (another work-based trip for Omar, and some more tagging along for me). Before I start, I should probably apologise for the lame use of the 'Once Upon a Time in Mexico' quote above.

Right, apologies out of the way, on to business.

Ann Arbor was our first stop, and very nice it was too. It's a small town, home to the University of Michigan and because of that it was very similar to Athens. Except that there was a lot more to do in Ann Arbor. And by a 'lot more to do', I mostly mean there were more random shops full of stuff that no-one actually buys to browse around. But that was nice. To be fair, there seemed to be a lot more 'happening', i.e. museums, theatres, music, good food, places to drink tea. In fact, such is there love of tea in Michigan that I'm actively campaigning Omar to look for his next job here if we can move somewhere more cosmopolitan.

As it happens, I didn't take any photos of Ann Arbor itself, but I did take some inside the brew pub we went to:

The shakiness of the photo of course doesn't have anything to do with intoxication on Omar's part. Of course.

Next stop on the tour was Detroit. Despite reading lots of bad reviews of the area beforehand, we thought that we'd pop in for a night, seeing as we're unlikely to be visiting again. Alas, some driving snow and howling winds also decided to 'pop in' at the same time, so we didn't get to do much sight-seeing. We did try to see some sights from the top of the GM-owned Renaissance Center, but apparently we're not la-di-da enough, and only people classy enough to eat in their fancy restaurant could go up to the 73rd floor. Pah.

But it's ok, we found pizza instead.....

And what a pizza it was!

And here are the guys making the pizzas (that blurred object is the guy throwing the pizza base onto the shelf)

 

The pizza parlour was in Greektown, so here's a picture of the main street - eerily reminiscent of Bedford Place's Kebab Alley if you ask me...

The next day we went to try some of the hotdogs that Detroit is well-known for...

 Apparently there's a lot of rivalry between these two hotdog vendors - we couldn't possibly choose between them, so we had one hotdog in each :-)

I preferred the 'dog' itself in American Coney Island, but the chilli on top was better in Layfayette Coney Island. So there you have it.

But our trip to Detroit wasn't all about eating (yes it was). We managed to venture out in the snow and went to the Detroit Institute of Arts.

I bet these guys are regretting not putting some socks on before they went out that morning (arf arf)

I didn't pin Detroit for being much of a cultural centre, but the museum had a lot of interesting stuff. Like these Van Gogh's....
 

 

And this Cezanne, amongst other things... and very splendid they were too. 

So that was about it for Michigan, save for a 9-hour hell ride through the snow blizzards back to Ohio. 

So all-in-all I'd give the parts of Michigan we saw a thumbs up, but it definitely lost marks because we didn't see Enimem even once while we were there :-( Maybe next time...