I was in Chicago (to be exact, Schaumburg) for a week from 29th of October to the 4th of November to attend the Global Leadership Summit held by Beta Gamma Sigma.
Obviously, the event wasn’t the highlight of the whole trip. It was more about the places I visited and the new friends I made, food eaten and window shopping experiences.
The hotel that the event was held had a pretty lobby with a huge fireplace in the center to warm up. It’s quite fancy, I must admit. However, I don’t know about paying $150 a night to stay here. It’s a very steep price.
A day before the event starts, I and my friend decided to explore downtown. Since the hotel was in Schaumburg, I had to take the metra to reach my destination (Union Station). Ordering and paying Uber to get to the station itself already posed a lot of problems for me since I had no sim card and credit card. In the end, I had to rely on Paypal and free Wi-Fi to survive. It wasn’t the most exciting experience ever since it was also snowing really hard and I was underdressed.
The weather was horrible and my legs were freezing for an hour and a half inside the train before I got off at the last stop. I met my friend at the nearest Starbux and headed for Willis Tower despite the shitty weather.
Of course, we couldn’t see much. It was just all white. $25 for nothing, anyone?
My underdressed self and my friend took another 30-35 minute walk from the tower to visit the Bean. My hands and legs were freezing but still, we marched forward. It was a bit annoying since it was drizzling and it just ruins the field of view from my glasses and my friend was taking pictures of everything every 3 seconds.
We had a great but overbearing lunch at Giodarno’s, a famous deep-dish pizza chain. It was a mistake for us to order appetizers since we ended up finishing it but couldn’t touch the pizza at all. We only ate one slice each and brought the rest of it home. We developed a trauma for cheese for the next 3 days.
My friend wanted to go to Trader Joe’s in order to get his acquaintances a bunch of shopping bags. Apparently, it’s a thing in Japan to give shopping bags from the States as souvenirs. While we were searching for the ambiguous entrance, I stepped on a steel railing and slipped, falling knee first to the ground while everyone was just staring at me. After that, “FML. It’s gonna be a horrible bruise. Oh, fuck it hurts.” was the only thing that I kept thinking about for the rest of the evening.
We tried going CVS for ointments dealing with bruises, but apparently they didn’t have it. In the end, we spent the last two hours just going around Target and Best Buy to search for something to buy and ended up going home empty-handed since the items we wanted weren’t in stock. We just decided to give up and go home.
Going home from Union Station was a scary experience. The trains didn’t have any announcements of which station they’re currently stopping at (unlike the train I took before) so I had to stay alert and count the stops. At some point, I just fell asleep and luckily, I woke up one stop before Schaumburg. God does exist.
To be continued next post.