ktravula - a travelogue! » Chicago

Chicago Outdoors

Kola — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 18:35:36 +0000

The city hasn’t changed much since the last visit. Only the traveller has. The lake front remains in its deceptive calmness, with boats and geese competing for space and attention. On one street corner is a lone saxophonist playing for change. On the other side of the street is a group of barely clad black dancers showing off to impressive hip-hop beats. They have an audience. A few feet away is a gay advocacy group holding up cards and urging pedestrians to get on the move to legalize same-sex marriage in Illinois as it is being done everywhere else. (After all, Chicago used to be the third biggest city in the US and thus the next biggest place to gather for such protests).

The other differences are conditional: a summer heat, a working fountain which – according to a guide – was said to have also been donated to America by France (just like the Statue of Liberty). The truth is less direct, of course. Wikipedia says the fountain was only designed by a Frenchman. The Bean of Chicago (actually called “Cloud Gate”) remained where it had always been, eluding contact on the first visit, and still impressive on contact. It’s made of stainless steel although everything else suggests otherwise. But of course, glass does not curve like that and would not have survived so much touch, knock and human contact, so there.

The Abraham Lincoln statue still sits in Grant’s Park, and the Ulyses Grant’s statue still stands at Lincoln Park. Chicago’s park humour. There are a few more: a homeless guy with a sign that says “Why lie. I (just) need a drink.”

Chicago-St.Louis

Kola — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 22:40:08 +0000

O’Hare International Airport looked ordinary. All that concerned me was that I was able to use the internet though I had to pay for it. A few hours later, on the megabus from downtown to St.Louis, I was able to continue, just before I dosed off and found myself back in St. Louis early in the morning. Even that city hasn’t changed, and it welcomed me with the warm breeze of the morning.

I definitely have changed, even if I say so myself. I carry some baggage of stress from all my “summer” travels, but it feels good to be finally “home” in one piece. Thank you for all the “congratulatory” messages. I appreciate them . Now, time to get back to work.

From the E to the L

Kola — Wed, 19 May 2010 00:09:33 +0000

The journey back home started with a short trip to St. Louis in company of a friend, and a Professor from my University who had graciously volunteered to give me a ride. Not having slept at all throughout the previous night, I succumbed to sleep many times before I found myself – quite in time – at the Lambert Airport, again. After removing my shoes and jacket, and after checking in the two big bags that I was permitted to check in, I hopped on the plane to discover that I had got a window-side seat once more.

I’ve never understood this, and right now I know that it’s more than just a mere coincidence that EVERY time I have travelled by plane throughout the last ten months, I got a window-side seat. The flight was booked for me by the Fulbright people so I believe that someone must have delighted in placing me at the best spot for action on flight. I thank him/her. By the time I got on the next plane from NY to France as well, I was on the window-side again, although on a different side of the plane. And needless to say, I slept off before take-off in those two instances. There goes the hope of the Fulbright flight arrangement officer for a detailed report of a plane take-off from St. Louis and New York City. Sorry pal . I however got a good shot of the landings. I’m thinking of making a Youtube video of them, but don’t bet on seeing them soon. My internet here doesn’t even do well with uploading pictures, so videos are out of it.

I was in New York long enough to have a decent meal of the day in good company of a friend and fellow Fulbright teacher in NY who had agreed to meet me, and then I headed out. No thanks again to the special arrangement of my flight officer, I didn’t have enough time to visit the supposed charming city of lights. Come on, was an eight-hour layover too much to ask for? In any case, now you have your wish, I’m now at home thinking of how much fun I could have had visiting Time’s Square, checking out Ground Zero, The Empire State Building and the United Nations’ Building. What about the Statue of Liberty, the Metropolitan Museums and Long Island? Well, you can have your New York City. I’ll keep my Chicago memories.

We at least have Oprah and Obama! Who do you have? And don’t tell me Letterman.

Poisson D’Avril!

Kola — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 05:00:40 +0000

Only one of the following is an April fool joke.

Cougar Village will kick me out of my residence after the 7th of May and I’ll have to find somewhere else to live.
Mafoya has got himself a car.
Ben has moved out to downtown Edwardsville leaving the whole apartment to me alone.
I have lost my wallet with all its cash and cards on campus, and got it back.
One of my host parents will undergo surgery sometime later this month.
I have plans to visit Chicago for one more time before I leave this region.
I have books by four Nobel Prize for Literature winners in my room at the moment.
I shot a one minute video for CNN on the 20th March.
A new friend of mine – an American – on Sunday referred to Iran as Irania.
In response to my letter, Western Union will offer 50% discount for two days in April to any part of the world.

Can you pick it out? You get something if you do Answers coming later today.

Before/After

Kola — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 08:34:27 +0000

“Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.” – Albert Einstein

PS: I’ve spent the last two hours deleting old pictures from my laptop since I discovered how much space occupied without need. It was an agonizing effort, I tell you. And for all the effort, I have only managed to free up to 14GB. I can’t say that I won’t do some more deleting later today. The photo above was taken at the Lake Michigan in Chicago. The combination of colours in the shot makes it one of my favourites, and it looks even better on paper. I think I’ll present it to Papa Rudy as a gift.

PPS: The guy in the picture is a paid model.

End of Term

Kola — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 02:26:43 +0000

With my final examination completed this afternoon, I am finally done with the Fall Semester, and the holiday for me officially begins. Let me tell you a little about the exam. It was a test of everything we have done in the Linguistics class, and it lasted an hour, forty minutes, even though I finished before the set time. The notable thing was that the professor allowed us to bring notes into the examination hall, as long as it was on only one side of a blank sheet, and handwritten. It was a way, I guess, to make sure that everyone has a chance to succeed.

Many other changes are taking place around the campus. It is thinning out, and in a few days, the once bubbling mini-town that is campus will become an almost ghost town. Chris, my housemate has already packed his bags and is heading home. Ben, the rugged one, will be here for a little while more, but he will also eventually leave, and I will have the whole apartment all to myself. I may have to go buy my own christmas tree… Audrey the French is leaving. Her academic exchange programme was supposed to last one semester, and is now over. We are organizing a party for her at the apartment on Friday, which should be fun. She was such a nice company, fun, adorable and lively, although I haven’t seen her for a while in the last three weeks because of the hectic nature of that time of the semester. Also leaving are other international students from France who came on the same programme as Audrey. They all added colour in some way to the semester.

My most memorable times with Audrey included a long walk around Chicago in November while we were trying to locate our hostel much without luck. Until then, I had never seen her cute Frenchie self so upset by anything. And even though we all tried to maintain a sense of balance as frustration grew on us and the maps refused to point us in the right direction, when we stood at the bridge across Michigan Avenue and thought of how to proceed, I thought I saw her really pissed off, especially since we didn’t seem to understand each other’s words and motives. Eventually, her phone came to the rescue and we found out that we had just walked past the HI Chicago building by just one block. I also remember one of the many discussions we had in Chicago about breastfeeding (she was thoroughly against it, believing that it is “disgusting” to have anything come out of her breasts for anyone to drink), religion (doesn’t believe in it, rationalizing that there is too much wickedness in the world to believe in a good and kind God), and homosexuality (doesn’t have anything against it, since humans all have the right to express whatever they are), and how opposed to Reham she was every time the conversations took place. “As soon as I have a baby,” Audrey always said, “I will spend all my nights in bed, sleeping while my husband will feed the baby whenever it cries. I carried the baby for nine months, after all, and I’m not about to lose my sleep for anybody.”

She was fun.

The semester was fun. I hope the next one is just as fantastic.

Random Blurry

Kola — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 12:46:51 +0000

…for lack of a better title…

This set of pictures consists of shots from Carbondale, Chicago and St. Louis.

The Cold Network & Other Stories

Kola — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 05:31:31 +0000

One day very soon, I am convinced, I will write a post on this blog that might begin with words like “tttoooeddydyy isssss teiehehe ffirissttt ddyofff snoeoow”, which would only mean that I was cold, freezing and shivering enough not to be able to edit simple sentences. I am convinced that that day is very, very soon. In fact sooner than I expect. Yesterday was my coldest night ever in Edwardsville and it reached -3degrees by my blog temperature meter, and 30degrees Fahrenheit. Even my bed now is too cold for comfort. Very soon I won’t have to go out to feel cold, and I am not looking forward to that.

Meanwhile, I’ve just returned from another day of feasting – probably my last of the Turkey Genocide season. This time, to the house of my “official” host family: the Indian father and the American mother. The special attraction was another visiting family from Chicago, who were originally from Nigeria. It had a father, let’s call him Dr. O, his wife, and two kids who would not speak Yoruba to me however I tried to make them. They were born in Nigeria but have lived in the States for a long time that they have become Americanized in dressing, speech and conviction in a way that could have been bad if it had hampered their cultural awareness. Apparently it hadn’t, and although they would rather not communicate in the language, they had a kind of cultural awareness that could only have resulted from good upbringing and appropriate socialization. To them, I must however have been a special kind of attraction as someone sent specifically from the home country to teach Americans the language. But if that was the case, I didn’t notice it. It was mostly a gathering of laughter, wine, food, and practical jokes. The first born of the Dr. Os is married to a beautiful American girl who was also present, and who I am discovering to be a masters student of my University as well.

In gatherings like this, I am almost always bringing back the topic of language and awareness, and here’s how Dr. A, my Indian host rationalized it from his reading in German, Indian, Irish, French, and African migrations to the United States: First generation immigrants usually speak and understand the language, being a product of the two cultural experiences, and usually try to pass it along to their children. Their children – the second generation with little connection to the cultural experience of the homeland beyond their parents’ teaching usually become rebellious and toss out the language and cultural ideas of their immigrant parents while opting for the American way of life. It is the third generation however – without any link whatsoever to their original culture and language, according to him - who make the most effort to reconnect with their grandparents’ cultural base. This, obviously, is because they are usually the ones without an anchor. They most experience the feeling of homelessness and limbo, and usually find themselves going back in research to connect with what they feel most deprived of. According to this theory, it is only a most natural process when children of first generation immigrants try to become “Americanized”. And everything made sense to me.

However, contrary to the seriousness of this last discussion which actually took place in the car drive back from his house, the atmosphere of the get-together was one more of conviviality, guitar playing, joking and generally fooling around. It was like one of those old times of my upbringing when I sat around my siblings on an idle night after a game of cards, just tossing around all the craziest ideas in the world, laughing, arguing and generally being silly. I bring it up here because now that I think about it, I suddenly miss those times when all that mattered was who had the silliest ideas, and we would stay up all night singing, scrawling on the wall, or decorating the house for Christmas with little coloured paper decorations cut out and sealed with pap syrup and stretched across the house ceiling sometimes with multicoloured Christmas lights. It is usually towards this time of the year as well when we begin to learn new Christmas songs or make a fool out of the old ones, all the time trying to be careful not to make too much noise that could get us the beating of our lives. Oh the times we had. Tonight, I’m convinced that we could never get back that memorable childhood in the same old form we enjoyed it, but I look forward to a grown-up future recreation of those experiences, this time along with nieces and nephews, and a bigger happier family. Some day soon folks…

Pondering Death

Kola — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 02:04:35 +0000

The only reason I can give for the title of this post is a recurring thought I have when entering any structure that is higher than a leaping distance from the ground. Saturday was one of them, and you already know what I was thinking while looking down from 630 feet. A few months ago while flying from Lagos to London, similar thoughts entered my head at some point during the long flight, and from London to Boston. What are my chances of survival from this height of over 60,000 feet? There is a kind of surrender that inevitably accompanies a decision to take a plane flight. Our lives are in the hands of the pilot whom we never ever get to see.

About two and a half weeks ago, there was a major news item about a pilot on the London-Boston route who was caught drunk just before take-off. Just two and a half weeks ago! The plane was grounded and the passengers resettled into another plane. Sigh. I mean, it could have been any of the planes that I have been in. And what are the chances that the pilot of my plane from London to Boston wasn’t equally drunk? Come to think about it, I kinda felt the plane shake and wobble one too many times during the flight. Or not. Well, one of the reasons Maya Angelou gave when she came to Edwardsville in October for buying her travel bus instead of travelling on a plane was a plane trip of hers in which the pilot, just a few seconds after take-off – even before the plane reached cruising altitude – came out of his cockpit and meet and greet “the distinguished Maya Angelou” who he had learnt was on board. Ha! According to her, she knew then that it was time to change tactics before someone got hurt from the effect of her star power. Those were not her exact words.

I can say also that one of the reasons for my choice of writing as a hobby, pastime, vocation or whatever one can call it is – not really a fear but – a preemptive strike against the eventuality of death. And no, I’m not depressed at the moment. Not even as bored as I might like to think. I’m just taking liberty with my ability to imagine.

Art Chicago III

Kola — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 05:50:16 +0000

Since I spent much of my time in Chicago last week either taking pictures or admiring the landscape and its contrasting colours, it is only fitting that I make a third, and maybe final post on what I saw while I was there. On the first night alone, I had already taken a few hundred photos of everything beautiful from road signs, shop signs, name tags to sign posts and street names. By the end of the weekend, there were already too many to choose from. Anyway, here are some of the rest, featuring the Willis Tower, a toy model of the city, the Navy Pier, Artworks on teh wall at Starbucks, the Fisher Building, the Buckingham fountain, the city at night, and a statue of President Lincoln at Grant Park. I hope you like them.

These are mainly of buldings, wall art, sculptures and sceneries. The next post about my Chicago trip will likely focus on Hostelling International, the 5-star hostel facility that hosted us to a kind of luxury for so much less.

ktravula - a travelogue! » Chicago

Chicago Outdoors

Related Posts

Chicago-St.Louis

Related Posts

From the E to the L

Related Posts

Poisson D’Avril!

Related Posts

Before/After

Related Posts

End of Term

Related Posts

Random Blurry

Related Posts

The Cold Network & Other Stories

Related Posts

Pondering Death

Related Posts

Art Chicago III

Related Posts