Chicago Day 1

Ok, I'm breaking these up because I'm probably going to ramble about them. And these are probably really uninteresting to everyone, but this is for me to look back on and remember what I did.

Sunday, March 28 2010:

We got to Chicago! My friends and I (there are 4 of us on this trip, Melissa, Katie Mac, and Kaitie (my roomie)) left school at 3:30am and I drove us to the St. Louis Amtrak station. We got there around 5:40 and boarded the train around 6. The train was really nice. I'd never been on an Amtrak train; they're very comfortable. The rain ride was 6 hours, so we slept, I read Rabbit Hole which is one of our summer plays, and then slept some more. We got to Chicago at 12:20 or so, and then we took our bags and walked the 5 blocks to Greek Town, where our Hostel, The Parthenon, is. It was a nice day, a bit nippy out, and windy which was to be expected.

So we checked our bags, because check in time wasn't until 3, and headed down to Girodanno's Pizza down the block. We ordered a medium pizza and it was HUGE. It was also quite possibly the best pizza I've ever had. We finished and then went exploring the area around our hostel to kill time before check in. We found some convenient banks, Starbucks, and a lot of Greek restaurants (imagine that). When we went back to check in, the man informed us that they had so many people that we were being upgraded to an apartment, with a private bathroom--for free! Awesome. We went up to the room and there were 4 British boys in the kitchen. We were really hoping to meet some foreign people on our stay here. Unfortunately we didn't really get to talk to them, and we'd figure out later that nobody is actually staying in our 3 bedroom 2 bathroom apartment with us, we just have a community kitchen that everyone uses.

So we unpacked in our little room with two bunk-beds. The upside was not having to store any of our things in lockers. Then we took off to walk east towards the Downtown Loop to see what all there was to see. We didn't want to purchase bus/train passes until the next day. We walked really far. We saw some amazing restaurants and we did a little shopping at an awesome Chicago store called Poster Plus. We went and saw 'The Bean' as Kaitie calls it. The Cloud Gate was really cool and we took a lot of pictures like the tourists we are. It was getting pretty chilly so after a couple more stops at some clothing stores, we headed back to the hostel. The Parthenon is actually owned by a family that runs the Greek restaurant it's attached to, so we ate there and it was really good. I had Cheese and Spinach Pies and then Crema Caramelle for dessert.

We crashed early because we hadn't slept much and the long day of walking definitely wore us out. We were in bed by 10:40.