DASH Productions

I am currently on Band Tour, and today we had a day off in Chicago. We were dropped off at Navy Pier. The only rules were to stay in groups of two or more, to have someone with a cell phone in each group (this one is pretty easy to follow since just about everyone has one), and to meet again at 2:30. What does one do with a couple of free hours in Chicago?? Well, more than one would think.

When we first got off the bus I was in a group of about 10 people. We were going to walk around Navy Pier and see what cool stores were around and just enjoy the afternoon. When we walked into the building we saw a stage with a guy doing a juggling show, so we stopped and watched that until it was over. We then proceeded to walk towards the end of the pier when someone noticed that their was a stained glass exhibit so we walked through that. The only thing was four of us walked through the exhibit in about two and a half minutes and the other six took much longer. When we saw them again, we told them that we would part ways because they hadn’t even made it through all of the exhibit yet. The four of us (Curtis, Vicky, Tiffany, and I) then walked to the end of the pier until we decided what to do next.

We decided that since we still had a little longer than an hour and a half left that we would walk into the downtown area and explore. After we had walked for a couple of blocks, we decided that we should find some interesting place to go into, so I point to a building that looked like it had some stores in it, so we walked through the door and there was an escalator going up. We went up the escalator and the only thing there was an elevator and a door into a parking garage. Since we did not want to go into the parking garage we got in the elevator and pushed “1”. The only problem with pushing “1” was that we went up (The other two buttons we “p” for parking and “g” for ground but we figured that out to late).

When we got out of the elevator we walked further into the city. We soon saw a huge gathering of people, so we decided to walk towards it. As we got closer to it we noticed that it was a large group of protesters, and so we were wondering what they were protesting. We walked further into the crowd and found out that they were protesting “Obamacare.”

As we were walking through the protest we were also simultaneously looking for a Starbucks. We soon spotted one and walked over to it. I ordered a Grande Peppermint Mocha and when I was pulling my wallet out, the person that had just bought a drink from the cash register next to me told my cashier that he would pay for mine too. I was very thankful for this unexpected blessing, even though I had plenty of money with me to pay for it. As he was walking out I once again was able to thank the man for his generosity.

We then started walking back towards Navy Pier. On our way back we saw a street performer that looked like he was about to fold himself into a box. Before he did though he took of his sweater and underneath he had on a bright greenish-yellow leopard spotted outfit and then did some really random things and we never actually saw him get into the box because we left because he was taking to long to get into the box.

When we met back at Navy Pier we loaded onto the bus and headed to Giordano’s which is a really good Chicago style pizza restaurant. We had some outstanding pizza took some funny pictures, then loaded up the bus to head to our next stop on tour. On the way to the next stop I watched “Up” (which if you read upside-down is “dn”). It was a pretty good movie in my opinion. Once again Pixar threw in an some stuff that only people that live in the East Bay would get. One of the places the kid liked to go was Fenton’s Ice Cream Parlor. When they mentioned that, I turned to the person that was watching it with me and said, “I have eaten at Fenton’s before and it is pretty good.” They said, “Wait, it is actually a real place?!?!” I thought this response was funny and I was able to explain that Pixar throws in subtle stuff like that in their movies that only people that have lived there would understand.

This was a pretty fun day, and if I ever have the chance to spend more time in Chicago, I would.