Adventure

Waking up at 3:30 in the morning, I can barely open my eyes. However, I
am so excited and look forward to get to Chicago! I got really confused when I was looking for the places on the map I got from the metro station. Not every street is shown and we had a hard time
finding the street that our hostel was located. Instead of following the Google map, we listened to local people's advice. We decided to transfer to brown line in downtown. After we got off the brown line, we realized that we actually ended up in a different town of our hostel. It is really hard for a tourist to go around Chicago by only looking at the map. One block on the map we used is actually not one block in reality. There are a lot of streets are unshown. It is also really confusing about the “North, East, West, and South's idea that people use in Chicago. While we were waiting for the bus, we saw a lot of trash and cotton-like stuffs flying around. We saw that the trash can had no cover. The condition of the street made us feel really uncomfortable. After 4 hours of "adventure", we finally got to our hostel. In the way to our hostel, I saw that the streets in Chicago are wide, but the continental cross walk in Chicago are narrow and people always walk outside the continental cross walk. The traffic light near our hostel is blocked. It is hard for pedestrian to see the traffic signal in day time. There are lot of potential safety problem in the intersection. Even though the street conduction made me feel unsafe, the special architecture in downtown really impressed me. It is also really interesting that see the metro driving through the city above the cars. It was two different feelings of looking at the city from the train and walking on the street. When we visited the millennium park, there is a outdoor concert. People are having picnic and joking the performances. We also took a lot of great pictures there. It is a really harmony view of seeing the tourist and local resident sharing and enjoying the open space.
-​Shining Yu