day 03 started with a visit to "stella's diner", a restaurant where we planned to have breakfast in downtown. inside it was just like i expected it. americans eating the fattiest and weirdest things for breakfast like scrambled eggs, bacon, sausages, french fries, etc, etc. everything for a good and healthy start of the day. erin, michael, and jake had something typical american, i had waffles with banana and nuts. again a sweet and delicious breakfast for me. afterwards we escorted jake to the amtrak railroad station since he is leaving for iowa to visit his parents. close to the railway station is the "sears tower", currently chicago's tallest building. then it began to hail and snow. according to a cab driver this happened the last time approximately 15 years ago. we decided to have sushi this evening and so erin showed us the "toro sushi" restaurant. a very small sushi restaurant which was full when we arrived, so the waitress offered to call us if there will be a table available for us. so we went to a nearby bar and had a beer there. the nice thing about "toro" is that you can bring your own booze. since we went to a japanese restaurant we decided to get some sake at a nearby liquor-store. the maki they had there were a little americanised it seemed to me. they had more filling looked a little fancier than usually maki looks at a japanese restaurant and it also tasted very spicy. i had a bento box with salmon teriyaki and sushi. it was delicious. near the sushi bar we also found an austrian bakery selling all kind of sweets and pies like they do in austria. unfortunately the shop owner was not present at that time, as an employee told us. we bought some apfel-, and topfen-strudel, and "michael's weekend special" (biscuit and chocolate, and some more sweet stuff). we wanted to keep this for breakfast for the next day, day 04. after that we went home in the snowfall in april.