"God! That was a good bite."

Dang. It's only Monday. In two days, we've nearly mastered the Chicago transit system, we've been to the far corners of the city, the nice sections and the not-so nice, we've eaten everything from deep-dish pizza to grossly expensive McDonald's and burnt through nearly half of our alloted weekly cash. Today we started our volunteer work Walter Reed Elementary school on the far south side of Chicago. Our task is to come up with a design for the wall of the gym and paint it...in five days: not impossible, but close. Luckily, we managed to finalize a design. I did my best to contribute but evidently my eye for design isn't as good as it should be; the majority of my ideas got shot down for one reason or another. Either way, the design is finished and we're ready to start painting.
After work today, we collapsed into nice three-hour long naps. Dinner was traditional, deep dish pizza at Pizza Due, the second generation of the world-famous Pizza Uno. Todd, one of my friends and roommates is a vegetarian so my usual "meat lovers" option went out the window only to be replaced by a fantastic four-cheese pesto deep dish. I'm getting hungry just thinking about it. I'm sure our waitress was the dearest, oldest spunky fake-redhead in the entire city. We adored the woman and she received an-almost 30% tip.
We walked to the Apple Store on Michigan Ave. and beheld all the Apple wonders there to see and made our way back to the hostel where we crashed, this time for good, for the rest of the night.

"Guys...where ahh we?"

Day two in Chicago was an action-packed on. Although we slept too late for breakfast at the hostel, we walked a block to Panera for some great bagels and croissants. Chicago is a laptop owners dream city with countless bubbles of Wi-Fi popping up here and there. We even have free access here in our room. In fact the entire city is very tech-savvy. It seems everyone here has a blue tooth headset, and iPhone or a Blackberry. They are also very well dressed.
After a quick train ride north of the city, we met up with Yoshi's cousin at one of the three million Starbuckses in the city. She took us around to some of her favorite sites in the Chicago Arts District. We pooped around to the various thrift stores and eventually ended up at a Whole Foods for lunch. I ate my outrageously expensive Reuben sandwich, Salt and Vinegar chips and All-Natural Key Lime soda in a cool community center with a great view of the area.

Then we napped...and it was glorious.

The chaperons made us an Italian dinner which we wolfed down and headed to Millennium Park to ice skate. It dawned on me as I laced up my skates that I hadn't set foot on a skating rink since seventh grade when I went with my youth group. Despite the tragic lack of practice, I managed to remain vertical the entire evening. We strolled around the park and saw the Great Silver Bean and the Spitting Face fountains. Lucie all-but molested an enormous bronze lion outside the Art Institute and Todd almost cartwheeled across a busy Chicago intersection; he didn't.

When we got back to our room we all settled in and started working on sketches for tomorrows jobs when out of nowhere, Yoshi decides she needs donuts. You wouldn't believe how hard it is to find an open Dunkin' Donuts at 12:45 in the morning but we were determined. After two stops on the Redline train and a short walk (more like a sprint) across a shady grocery store parking lot, we stumbles across a 24 hour Dunkin' Donuts, Baskin Robins combo shop: the midnight snacker's paradise. A dozen donuts and ten dollars later we were on our way back when we took a wrong turn or a wrong train (I'm not sure which). Whatever the reason was, we missed our stop and had to amble around the city to find our barrings again.

Eventually, we made it back and were able to enjoy the fruits of our late-night labors. Sadly such indulgences don't leave much time for sleep. We have to be up and ready for breakfast by nine in the morning and after a day like today, a nice, long shower is certain called for.

In The Windy City

I'm writing this post from Hostel International in Chicago. I know what you're thinking: "A hostel? Really? Isn't that...you know, dangerous?" and believe me, I thought the same thing when I first found out. In reality though, this place is really pretty great. Sure, it's no Ritz Carleton; it's not even a Holiday Inn, but it is nice. We're staying in a room of six (three bunk beds) with our own bathroom and a little "kitchen" area. We left CCAD at ten-something and drove for three or four hours until our bladders demanded that we make a stop.
Lunch was an eleven dollar basket of breaded chicken bones and greasy fish nibblets at Popeye's. I've noticed that long bus trips, for no particular reason, give me headaches. I have an impossible time finding a comfortable position (a fact to which my friend Yoshi can certainly attest) and I bore very easily due to the fact that I cannot read or write (or indeed do anything that involves focusing attention on any one spot for more than a few minutes) without experiencing wave after wave of motion sickness. Needless to say, I was happy when the bus pulled up to Union Station to let us off.
We rode a train to the hostel, unloaded and turned right back around to go find some food. Being the poor college students we are, we ended up buying the cheapest things from a 711 two blocks from the hostel and heating them up back in our kitchen. The rest of the night has been spent chilling in the lobby, watching LOST and "When Harry Met Sally". Now I'm tired and going to head up to my small, crinkly, bunked bed and awake to greet the morning, here in the windy city.