Advertisement
Published: March 29th 2007
Edit Blog Post
Last week was my spring break. This past Friday through Sunday, I got to go to Chicago on MegaBus - www.megabus.com. It's amazing! I got a round-trip bus ticket from Minneapolis for $40... even going by car would have been more expensive. And the nice thing is, the bus only made only one half-hour-long stop in Wisconsin for lunch, so the bus ride didn't take any longer than it would have taken to drive in a car. Anyway, the reason I went to Chicago was to visit my roommate who I had in Vienna, Alex, as well as two of my other friends (Robert and Katie) who were in Vienna last semester, who live in Chicago.
Here is a summary of the weekend, plus some pictures 😊
Friday:
Bus ride - not very eventful, except for a group of people who kept yelling, "We are the REVIVALS! We are causing a revolution on THIS BUS!" Then they would burst out laughing and say things like, "Gawsh, we are so weird - I love it!" That got a little tiresome, for sure!
The bus got into downtown at about 3:30, rather than 2:00, because traffic in Chicago
is not exactly magical. Then I took the train to Lake Forest. Alex goes to Lake Forest College, and that is a *really* nice campus. Alex's mom works at the hospital in Lake Forest, and has a free membership to the fanciest gym that I have ever seen in my life, and Alex wanted to work out, so we used one of her guest passes and friggin' broke into a sweat, dude. Dude. Dudeeee. Um... okay. Then we went back to the college and ate at the student center, and I brushed up on my pool and ping pong skills, which are terrible, since Augsburg has... well, no pool tables.
That evening, we PARTIED like it was 2007! LoL... it was a really lame Euro Club thing that was organized by the international student organization, and because it was so lame, it was a lot of fun. I mean, Euro Club and "lame" are synonyms, pretty much. "Baila Hee," or whatever that song is called, is Romanian, which I didn't know until that night. Because Alex is Romanian, and there are about nine other Romanians at that school, it was awesome hearing people who knew ALL of the words
to that song.
Saturday:
We took the train to downtown Chicago, met up with Katie and Robert, and had a really random day. We did everything from running around alleys with cool winding staircases (fire escapes) to seeing the opera house, looking at all of the shiny stuff at Millennium Park, seeing Robert's work place (Allen Edmonds, or something - this really fancy shoe store on Michigan Ave. where famous people get their shoes), going to Sephora and giving ourselves free makeovers, having many interesting conversations with people around downtown, etc. We got really hungry and had real Chicago pizza, which I'd never tried before. Because Chicago pizza is so thick and filling, a medium-sized pizza split among the four of was was more than enough.
After the pizza and breaded mushrooms, we found a Julius Meinl. That's Austria's boasted "best coffee brand in the world," and, so far, I agree. Chicago has the only Julius Meinl cafe in the world outside of Austria, so we were pretty excited. I got myself an Eiskaffee and felt nostalgic. There was live violin music, and the waiter was a pompous jerk, which made it even more authentic 😊 That
whole day just goes to show that in a city as fun as Chicago, it is very possible to go the whole day without spending much money, yet still have a blast.
Anyway, Sunday is nothing worth noting, really. I saw Lake Michigan's beach, and it was tempting since it was in the 70s (which was kind of scary because the day before, it was about 20 degrees colder.)
Well, that sums up that weekend. The weekend before that, at the beginning of spring break, I got to go to Waldsee, which is the Concordia German Language Village, where I was once a camper. So this time, I was a counselor, and it was very interesting taking on that role. I have applied to work there as a counselor this summer, so I'm crossing my fingers that I'll get hired. If not, at least there are two more weekend sessions at that camp between now and when summer starts, and I have been asked to come back for those weekends.
I'll post some pictures from both of the weekends.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.067s; Tpl: 0.016s; cc: 21; qc: 31; dbt: 0.0375s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Mom
non-member comment
Gotta do the bean
Now, Alia, you've put a bee in my bonnet, and I have to add "seeing the Bean" to my list of "must do's before I die." Shouldn't be hard to do with $40 RT tickets.