WE WEREN'T ALLOWED TO STAY AT NIGHT, WHEN THE MUSEUM COMES ALIVE

MY SCHOOL FAIRS ALSO HAD A FERRIS WHEEL

On our third day in Chicago, Joe and I went to The Field Museum in Grant Park. The featured attraction, at least through Sept. 7, is the exhibit on the 1893 Chicago's World's Fair, which was attended by 25 million. 

The fair was 22 years after Mrs. O'Leary's cow kicked that bucket and started the great fire that devastated the Windy City. The fair served as a signal that Chicago had risen from the ashes while also putting the entire world on display. 

Wednesday was a rough day for me. I developed a runny nose, sore throat and headache over the weekend and into Monday, so I bought NyQuil on Tuesday while we were out and about. 

I took three doses throughout the night Tuesday, and that strategy backfired as I awoke Wednesday woozy as all hell. I dealt with that by walking all over the damn city. I felt drunk and didn't have my bearings, but here's what I shot at the World's Fair exhibit. 

The fair was scheduled for 1892 to mark 400 years since Columbus "found" the new world. But delays pushed it back to early 1983. It lasted for six months. 

There were so many exhibits showing off so many cultures that a museum opened the next year on the fair's grounds. The museum was moved to its current location in 1921, where it grew into a complete natural history museum. 

There were many different tickets for the World's Fair, with different days being special attractions. Oct. 9 was designated as Chicago day at the fair to commemorate the fire. Moooo!

You could get high at the World's Fair. Is that shit still good?

This was a quartz from the fair. The museum lets you touch it. I felt it up real nice. 

These were made by the Sioux Indians. Unfortunately, part of the point of the fair was to tell Westerners that their culture was far more advanced by putting Native Americans and other cultures on display as savages. Blacks had a small role, too. There was a black day at the fair, which Frederick Douglass used to speak about injustices. 

Peruvian mummies was a unique display at the 1893 fair. The museum had an interactive element where you could see inside the cloaks. There was the skeleton and several idols buried with the dead. 

That is a musical instrument played by the Java at their station at the fair. 

We went through several other exhibits, including a look at hundreds of animals and their place in the world. The most interesting exhibit was Evolving Planet, which was highlighted by an explanation of the six mass extinctions in Earth's history. 

That's Sue. She -- the sex is actually unknown -- greets guests upon Field Museum entry. She was found in South Dakota in 1990 and is believed to be 65 million years old. She is the largest -- 42 feet and seven tons -- and most preserved T-Rex in the world. 

Four things I learned on my trip. 

-- Flamingos are pink only because of the algae they eat. 

-- There are 10 kinds of Tyrannosaurus. T-Rex is just the most well-known. 

-- Dinosaurs went extinct either because of a giant meteor that hit Mexico or a volcano that erupted in India. In either theory, the dinosaurs went caput either because it got too hot or it got too cold. 

-- We are currently living during the sixth mass extinction. 

So we, uh, got that going for us.