Spring Break; or, Brian Gone Wild!

This past week was spring break here at the University of Michigan, and, like previous spring breaks in my academic career, I planned to go nowhere and do nothing. Among my friends at the University of Utah it was a very rare exception for anyone to travel anywhere during spring break (except for '03, when I took a road trip with friends to L.A. for Magic Mountain and a Price is Right taping - good times), so I assumed the same would be true here. However, it turns out that EVERYONE here goes away for spring break. All my friends went away to California or Mexico or Graceland or even Israel, and I saw that I would have nothing to do and no one to hang out with if I stayed here. So at church last Sunday, I talked to some of the other people who had also been stranded here, and we formed an impromptu plan: Chicago road trip! Leave chilly old Ann Arbor behind for the even chillier Windy City!

So John McElderberry (b. McElderry), Damien Stonick, and I hit the road on Tuesday. The trip should have taken about 4.5 hours, but we had to battle a snowstorm that came off Lake Michigan, stopping literally stopping the traffic flow for about an hour, making the trip actually take about 6 hours. We stayed with my aunt Barbara and uncle Rulon in Naperville, which is an hour train ride away from downtown Chicago. This was the fifth time I had been in Chicago since May 2005, but in the past I had only been there for portions of a single day and I didn't get the chance to see anything outside of the main downtown area. This time we had two full days, and we hit a bunch of museums I hadn't seen before, such as the Museum of Science and Industry (overrated, overpriced, undereducational - it seemed to be targeted at the 6-10 age range) and the Field Museum (two very enthusiastic thumbs up - great exhibits, very informative, made you wish you had more time to explore + it was free!).

John and Damien at a "scientific" exhibit about the circus at the Museum of Science and Industry.

Two homo sapien heads on display at the Field Museum - now that's science!

It was also my first visit to Chicago's Chinatown, which was a little bit of a letdown since it was so cold that there was nobody out on the street selling cheap knockoffs like I had imagined.

We also hit the Art Institute of Chicago. It was my fourth time there but I could never get tired of that place - it's worth it just to see those three great Kandinsky paintings in person again. They had rotated their collection a bit and it was exciting to see different works on display. Other activities repeated from previous trips were deep-dish pizza, hot dogs from street vendors, and a visit to the giant reflective Bean, but come on - you've got to do all that stuff as a tourist in Chicago, even if you've done it all before.

At the Bean last May - note the lack of snow.

A big thanks to Barbara and Rulon for letting us stay with them!