Our meetup time was 8 AM, so of course we ended up downstairs 12 minutes late. We walked in weird muggy slightly sprinkling weather to get breakfast from a nearby café. After our quick breakfast, we headed to the L in order to get to Evanston for our Northwestern info session and tour.
There were a few things I found pretty weird about the L on our long train ride to Evanston. To begin with, it’s blue, very blue. The seats are blue, the walls are blue, and anything that wasn’t blue was gray. It wasn’t particularly grungy or smelly, but there was quite some blue.
You can’t walk between cars. I’m personally used to BART cars and the ability to pretty easily move from car to car. On the L there seemed to be no such possibility. The ends of each car had a giant sign saying “STOP Do not open. Emergency use only.” Whether or not people chose to listen to this I have no clue, but the space between cars was much scarier than the strange accordion type thing between BART cars, instead were chains and wires keeping the cars together, and the space between them was open.
The last weird thing about the L is that it isn’t really that high up. It’s strange to realize that you could look out your second or third story window and see a train go by. I know BART trains go by apartment buildings and houses, but is significantly higher up than the L. We were close by so many windows it seemed almost like we were hovering just above the ground.
I spent most of the hour ride thinking about the logistics of rapid transit in different cities and enjoying the buildings and trees outside.
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| The Rock |
I didn’t expect to like Northwestern as much as I did. We ended up with a packed group of people at the info session, but throughout the presentation a lot of our questions were answered. Sadly, at the end of the presentation there was only time for 3 remaining questions. At the very end of the presentation they brought out the tour guides. We listened to all of the tour guides until the last one introduced herself. Her name was Jordan and she majored in Physics, minored in Theater, and managed to get her masters degree in Mechanical Engineering all in four years! So, considering that I want to major in Physics and Jahnvi wants to be an engineer, she was the obvious choice.
We had a really fun tour of the beautiful campus, and the more we walked and Jordan talked, the more I could see myself going to Northwestern. Jordan seemed like she was really being honest with us about what to expect and what the student population was like through her detailed stories. We ended up asking her for food recommendations and Jahnvi talked with her about Engineering majors.
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| Us with Jordan |
We went to the school store and then to one of the little campus beaches. Jahnvi wanted to go into the water and we all followed. Literally every time we see water Jahnvi wants to go in, but hey water is fun.
We got pizza at Giordano’s and headed back into the city to see Millennium Park.
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| Us. |
The first thing we saw at Millennium Park was Crown Fountain, which of course has water involved. My shoes were off before Jahnvi even said anything about it. The fountain has two tall block structures with a person's face on one side and water raining down. We splashed around for a bit, and then almost immediately managed to climb on something we weren’t supposed to in a different spot on the way to the bean. We were told off by a woman who told us there were signs saying not to climb it, but sadly no one had placed a sign at the entrance we came through.
Then of course we saw the Bean, which though it had rained in the morning still looked dirty, and we took some typical tourist style photos in front of it. We retired to the hotel and swam in the indoor pool before going to our rooms to blog.
My first apartment was in El Cerrito just south of Moeser Lane. It was a second story apartment and was the same elevation as the BART tracks right across the street. What you experienced had the tracks much closer to the apartment windows but where I was at was miserable.
ReplyDeleteWhen I looked at the apartment, there were no BART trains whizzing by. Shortly after moving in, though, every time a train would whiz by the wall hangings would rattle. It wasn't the calmest of settings.
This is one of the reasons I have such trouble with these 'transit villages' in El Cerrito, Richmond and elsewhere with apartment buildings right next to BART and Amtrak tracks. The people making the decisions and planning these things obviously have no intention of living next to train tracks.