11-1-10 (for about two more minutes…)

This whole consistency thing is harder than I thought it would be. Not because I don’t have things to say; I have tons of things still that I could talk about from the Chicago trip and everything. But justifying the time to sit down with this silly blog that nobody reads…well, I have lots of other things I could/should be doing. Like sleeping. I'm so tired, my eyes are practically closing themselves. But this blog is an agreement that I made with myself. And I’m trying to keep those better these days.

Saturday, then. Good grief; it seems like forever ago! But Saturday, I woke up around 830 without even setting an alarm, but cuddled back into bed for awhile, read my Bible, did a bit of journaling, as you can see at the end of my last post. Oh, those cats.

A bit later, though, Abi went over to her friend Alyssa’s apartment to make Swedish pancakes, and the rest of us followed a bit later. They were delicious, if a bit odd – a Swedish pancake is a bit like a crepe, and really simple, just flour and water and egg, I think. You fry them really thin, and then spread things on them, like jelly and peanut butter. I only had one, but it was delicious. Alyssa also had caramel and green apples, and a roomful of Swedish friends for us to meet. It was fun, and everyone was really nice and welcoming. Josh and I left comparatively soon, though, because we had a day of adventure before us!

Abi gave us directions back to the el, and away we went. (I forgot to mention the part where we decided where we were going – DePaul, then Columbia, then the Coach store (!!!), Navy Pier, and Gino’s East for dinner.) We took the brown line down to DePaul, and it was a pretty ride in daytime. I mean, not in the way you usually think of pretty scenery, with rolling vistas and such. Mostly it was the backs of houses and apartment patios. But on a bright, cool morning, in a new place with places to go and people to watch and all kinds of possibility to consider…it was really quite lovely.

So we got off and, after a quick and necessary Starbucks stop, made our way around DePaul. It being the weekend, there wasn’t much of anyone to talk to, but we got a feel for the campus and the neighborhood anyway, and their library and theatre buildings certainly beat the stuffing out of Truman’s.

After that, we took the brown line a little further down to Columbia College, which is on Michigan Avenue, which is apparently this Big Shopping Deal in Chicago. Columbia was quite inaccessible, being almost entirely closed and locked up on the weekends, but we visited the photography gallery and that was interesting. The theme was something to do with the issue of our Mexican border. Some of those pictures were really haunting. I can still remember the children's serious faces, and the empty look in some of their eyes. I remember, especially, the picture of the prostitute with her dress pulled up over her face. It was an unexpected interlude to our trip, but the kind that sticks with you, after.

By this point, we’d been visiting grad schools for half the afternoon, picking up pamphlets and asking questions and poking around – you know, school-visit stuff. It was time for a) food, and b) seeing a few sights.

Next time: up Michigan Avenue.