Tuesday: Day 2

I woke up early to get some breakfast, work out, and get my U-Pass before our first session at 9am. This U-Pass really is amazing. I kept hearing about how great of a deal we're getting on it and I didn't really realize how much of a deal until I heard Uncle Dave talk about how MUCH transit costs in the city. We got this University Pass for only 70 dollars...for all four months that we're here. It works at any city transit, all except taxis basically...busses, trains, etc.
Our session at 9 was about our interviews and how to go about asking questions, how best to answer questions, etc. All of it I had heard before in class with professor Attema. I felt very prepared for these interviews coming up.
The next session at around 10 was about housing and roommates in Chicago. How to go about looking at the rooms and how many to put in a room, etc. We got to see a general location of where the apartments are around the city...most located very near or in the loop downtown.
We had a short break and then walked a few blocks from the hotel for a big group picture. Not so fun because I sat in bird poop and got my gloves all stinky and dirty too. sick. We left from the picture location with another different small group to go to a restaurant of our choice wherever we wanted. We all had our U-Passes so we really could have gone anywhere.
Our session after lunch was all about how the buildings and streets are labeled. North, South, West, East of State and Madison streets. We got two huge maps with street names and transit systems and we went over the quickest routes to take from a starting location to a destination. Good to know, and VERY USEFUL. We had another short break, but not long enough for a nap just yet at 2:00.
We got into different groups again and received our envelopes with our interview sites at around 2:30 and talked a bit about them with Leslie, our co-ordinator. I was given 5 interview sites. Most of which are located in the loop, conveniently enough!
From then until supper we were able to do some research about the companies for our interviews, either information they had on file or information from the internet.
at 4:30 we dragged our tired bodies back into the Walnut room for an alumni panel discussion. The three Chicago Semester alumni talked about their expectations and how it played out on their experience with the program. They gave us pointers and things to keep in mind about the program as well.
At suppertime we all got into different groups and went to a restaurant of a different ethnicity. I was in the group for the Ethiopian restaurant. So we took the Red line to get down to Clark street again and walked a bit past Clark's restaurant, the one I was at before.
We got in there and looked at the menus, [which we didn't have to do becaues the server picked our platters anyway] and decided on two platters, a spicy one and a mild one.
I knew from the beginning that I wouldn't like this food, but I tried some anyway. The server came out with some crepe-like bread, which I thought would be good. But it ended up being some sour-dough/vinegar-like crepe bread. yuck. We were supposed to tear off pieces of this bread to use to scoop up the food from the big platters. Yah, no silverwear. And because I didn't like this bread anyway it wasn't too good. I tried some brown dogfood-like chunks in the middle and they tasted like sweaty armpits...it ended up to be lamb. Poor lamb. I'm not a fan.
The mushed up chickpeas were okay, but my favorite was the chicken. It was actually bearable, although spicy, I ate it with my fingers.
After supper we calmed our spicy tongues with some ice cream or doughnuts from dunking donuts next door. Now that goes down a little better than lamb.
We took the red line back to the hotel and had more time to research our companies and prepare for interviews. It was another late night...I went to bed around midnight.