Walking in... Chicago

[Pictures for this post are to be found on this site, and in my Flickr album.]
What a vibrant and lively city! I love it. I didn't really get to see a lot of Chicago the last time I was there, the 4 days I was stranded there while trying to get home to Norway after missing my flight connection, but this time was, of course, different. On Friday I blew off (ditched, cut, whatever) all my classes in order to do the kind of last minute preparations I usually make before a trip, and even then I found I didn't have enough time to do the things I wanted to get done. Sure, after a while I realized that I maybe didn't need to do laundry again, since I had just done it the day before, and sure, I didn't need to buy a phone card or contact solution, so after cutting my proposed tasks down to a bare minimum, I had enough time for the really important stuff, like packing.

My flight left at 1:15 p.m. that day, and I was in Chicago just an hour later, after having a short, but informative conversation with an insurance representative sitting beside me, who was going down to Texas to clean up the mess the hurricanes left down there. It was raining a little bit when I stepped out of the subway station around 2:45 p.m., and I was just astonished by the sight of all the skyscrapers reaching toward the skies high above me. By then I had forgotten both the hostel's name and address, so I walked around aimlessly for about an hour, not so much trying to find the hostel, as to soak in the visual aspects of this energetic city.

I was the only one in the hostel room for the first ten minutes there. Then a guy named Anders, another Norwegian from Georgetown University in D.C., arrived. He told me that the president of ANSA and an other guy was waiting downstairs for him, and I just attached myself to their little group. We all went out to a blues club, actually, in downtown Chicago, where they of course had a strict enforcement of the 21 year age limit on alcohol. Rasmus, the ANSA president, bought us all a beer, but of course then the bouncer came to check up on me. "You're not gonna drink that, are you?" he asked, and the next thing I knew I was drinking Coca-Cola from a straw. Just as well. I like Coke.

When we got back to the hostel, around 7, we all went out again to have dinner as a group. I'd estimate there to be about 25-30 ANSA rep's there, so the dinner at a pretty popular family pizza place became somewhat lively. Fun, though. The 9 sitting at my end of the table ordered 2 large pizzas, one big pasta platter, and one big serving of chicken on pasta in marinara sauce for us all, which we then shared amongst ourselves (which was the restaurant concept; order big and share). After the long and fun dinner, everyone got into cabs and were transported to the other side of town. I, naive and blue-eyed as I am, thought the student priest and the one local girl were going late night sightseeing, that she was going to show him the hotspots of Chicago, so I joined them in the priest's rental car. It turned out to be nothing of the sort, my two companions were also going out drinking and partying, and were actually going to the same place as the other guys. 19 as I am, I had a snowball's chance on the Equator of being admitted to any of the Chicago clubs and bars, so I decided to take a 3 mile stroll downtown instead, starting by the Oz Park and ending up somewhere by the John Hancock Building, before I got lost and hailed a cab (which, by the way, had the crabbiest driver I've ever met, a quite unpleasant night time experience).

All through Saturday, from 10:00 a.m. to about 5:00 p.m., we had our ANSA organizational meeting. We talked about emergency procedures, the Norwegian student priest service in the US, the Norwegian government's presence, ways to improve ANSA, among other things. Then: Sightseeing with Anders and some of the other people I'd gotten to know the past two days. Our downtown trip reinforced my view of Chicago as an exciting, beautiful and vibrant city, a city I definetely want to return to some day. The other guys wanted to go shopping, but Anders and I went on to see more of the city, all the way to when we should have seen the huge Lake Michigan, but then we discovered that there were no good lookout points and strolled back on a different street, to see even more.

Then: The whole group went out for pizza at Joey's Pizzeria, which was great. I sat by Rasmus and the consulate general of San Francisco, so I had a few interesting conversations. After dinner, which was around 11:00 p.m., we all went to one of the guys who lived there's place, on the 20th floor of a skyscraper, and the the cool thing was that Hansa had sponsored the party (which I plead the 5th on).

On the Sunday I woke up at 8:00 a.m., checked out (the others were dead asleep still), and walked slowly down State Street, and suddenly met like 40,000 runners in the 2005 Chicago Marathon. Interesting. Anyways, then I didn't have change for the subway, just a $5, so I had to scavenge the local stores for people who could break a $5. After some searching, I walked into a Subway (the sub place), and there the sales clerks couldn't help me until someone bought something, which seemed like 10 minutes off. Desperate as I was, I turned to a man behind me in line, and asked if he could break a $5. "Sorry," he said, sympathetically, "but what do you need it for?" I said that I needed one more dollar for the subway, and then he suddenly handed me the bill. "Here you go," he said, just saving my day. Without him coming to my aid I might have lost my subway connection, and eventually have lost my flight, so I say thank you to the generous man in the State St. Subway that day.

That was my trip, and the pictures are to be found at this site. Check out my Flickr album from the trip, as well.

posted by CK @ 03:53