Chicago!

Hello all. Just as a precursor/advanced warning…this post is kinda long – as it recounts my last few days in their entirety.

As I type I am currently sitting in a hotel room in downtown Chicago, chilling out and enjoying some time off of my feet. The past couple days have been…average…I suppose would be a good word. On Saturday morning I got up at the beautiful time of 4:20 in the morning (which was weird, because there have been Friday nights where I’ve stayed up later than that), and we set out on our twelve hour bus ride through Missouri and Illinois.

The trip was pretty uneventful. I slept alot.

We arrived around six or seven at a church in LaGrange, which is a suburb of Chicago. We had a rehearsal and then a dinner at the church, and then we went to stay with host families. I stayed with a couple guys named Alan and Robin (for you non-JBU people), and our family was Mr. and Mrs. Holman, a couple in their mid 70’s.

They were extremely hospitable…we each had our own room with queen sized beds and plenty of food/ginger ale. We spent the evening watching The Empire Strikes Back on Alan’s laptop.

On Sunday we woke up nice and late again…that is…six in the morning. We went over to the church and had another rehearsal before we performed for the 8:00 service. We didn’t do our whole lineup, so we “only” sang for a little over an hour. Then came doughnuts and a half hour of lying exhausted on the floor. Then performing for over an hour again! Then eating Wendy’s and piling in the buss for an hour ride into Chicago to a United Methodist church, where we rehearsed for a half-hour and then performed again at 4:00. This time it was the full program, so we sang for a couple hours, including our quartet from the talent show.

Afterwards the church fed us some dinnner, and we headed back an hour to LaGrange to stay with the same host families again. Alan and I found that some house in the neighborhood had a wireless internet connection without a password, and if you sat in the exact right spots in the house you could pick it up for a minute or so at a time before it would give out. After a lot of moving around and holding our laptops up in the air trying to find the signal, we gave up on that idea, and instead just kinda hung around until 11:30 or so and then went to bed.

We were supposed to leave at 8:45 that (or…I guess that would be this morning – that seems so long ago though!) to be at the church in time (the bus was leaving at 9:00), and so I promptly woke up at 8:40. I dressed in about sixty seconds, packed in about two minutes, swallowed down the eggs, bacon, and orange juice that our host mom had been kind enough to prepare in another two minutes, and was ready with plenty of time to spare (around thirty seconds).

We drove an hour and a half into Chicago, and…did something. But I have no idea what. I can’t remember. Just a sec…. Oh yeah right. We went to the Lincoln Park Zoo and saw some lions and tigers and…monkeys. Oh my. It was kiiinda cold. As in thirty-something degrees and reeeallly windy (Windy City…duh.) cold. Lunch was at Potbelly’s Sandwiches (very good!), and then we took the El (that’s Chicago’s train system for those of you who are unaware of such things) downtown. Then we had free time to do whatever we desired!

I would’ve enjoyed just walking around and looking in shops or doing whatever…but my group decided our time would be better spent by walking half an hour to the Field Musuem, paying the eight dollar admission price, and spending the only hour we had before it closed wandering around looking at dinosaur bone models. Then we walked a half hour back in temperatures that had now dropped to freezing.

Chicago style pizza is good though! :)

And now…here I am. In the hotel. With only a billion more concerts to go.

Yaaay.