Today was our free day to explore Chicago. One of the things we were most excited for was to sleep in! After we finally got up, we drove into downtown Chicago for a day of fun. We first took our obligatory picture at the Bean.
We all had fun looking at our reflections in the Bean! After that, we went to check out this really cool playground in Millennium Park called Maggie Daley Playground. The playground is themed around a pirate ship! The low bridge we walked across had a slanted side, so one of us decided to slide down it, but then one of the park workers yelled at us for it! That didn’t stop us from continuing onto the Maggie Daley playground. Even though the playground was “recommended” for ages 5-12, we played on this huge play structure with a very tall slide. Even though we got a little bit stuck in the slides, it was a lot of fun to slide down.
After having fun in Maggie Daley, we headed to the Art Institute. There are a lot of pictures from famous artists, like Picasso, Dali, Monet, Pollock, and Degas. It was very cool to see well known paintings like Monet’s Water Lilies in person. One of the most unique exhibits was the miniatures room, which was a series of European/American rooms throughout history scaled down to the size of a doll house! They were so detailed that if you just took a picture of the room, it seemed like we actually were in the miniature rooms.
We had a lot of fun looking at all of the exhibits, posing like sculptures, and stopping by the gift shop to get souvenirs and secret thank you cards for Anna, Simrun (the trip organizers), and Bryan (our chaperone).
We were very hungry after walking around the Art Institute, so we went to Latinicity, a Latin food themed food court in a mall downtown. We ate with a few Lindblom alumni who were now Michigan students, so it was very cool to get to know them a bit more. After eating, we stopped by the Disney Store to see all of the adorable stuffed animals they had! It was tempting to get a few, but the prices were a little too rich. We then broke off the group, with Erin going to see a Saturday Night Live exhibit at the Museum of Broadcast Communications to see an SNL exhibit, and the rest of us going to get Bryan’s thank you gifts at Target and Walgreens. We made sure to get him a miniature version of the van he had been driving us around in. Shwetha painted this van, Serin and Lauren wrote notes explaining all of our different gifts, Casey wrote the card, and Anna took a well deserved nap.
Our day downtown came to a close in Chinatown, where we went to Joy Yee Plus to get noodles and boba. It was great food with huge portions. Bryan seemed to enjoy his gifts, and was very impressed that we were able to put it together in a day. We wanted to sign Anna and Simrun’s thank you cards in secret, so we passed them under the table during dinner. After our delicious dinner, we headed back to the hotel for a little bit more fun with a game night. After playing Codenames and Euchre, we called it a night after a very fun free day.
