The four of us who left our little sleepy town yesterday have now landed safely in the bosom of the Windy City. The journey from St. Louis to Chicago only took five long hours on a double decked megabus that offered a beautiful view of the pitch blackness of the road and only a little compensation of little street and vehicle lights. A journey during the day might have given a little more to rejoice for as far as road sight-seeing is concerned. It was something to be thankful for however that it provided a few pockets of sleeping time for us who had spent an earlier part of the evening riding in a private van all the way from Edwardsville. The bus which left the St. Louis Union Station pulled over at the Chicago Union Station a few minutes after six this morning, and we the travellers stepped into the cold wind with gigantic buildings blocking our view of the beautiful morning sky.
We are Reham, Audrey, Mafoya and I: two males, two females; three Africans and one French; two Fulbrighters and two International students; two and a half speakers of French, one of Arabic and one and a half of Yoruba; one moslem, an atheist, one Christian and one composite. In short, a United Nations of sorts. We have so far visited a few fun places, and as I lay here typing after a long day, I don’t know just where to start. The day had definitely been fulfilling, from getting lost on the streets, to getting shoved within a crowd of busy pedestrians going and coming without a discernible pattern of intentions. From becoming the centre of attention on the corner of a busy street because of a heady insistence to consult the large city map right there to the long, pleasant ride up into the Sky Deck observation area of the Sears (Willie’s) Tower to get an aerial view of the whole city, and to learn more of the very much cultural import of this city that has defined America in more ways than one. From a long walk on Adam’s street coming from the magnificent Sear’s Towers to the enchanting awesome experience of the corridors of the Art Institute of Chicago – an experience of a lifetime that requires a long post of its own. From sitting at Starbucks on an early Friday morning observing people getting their morning beverage ritual to returning home tired at night to this five star hostel that had put up no big public sign of its name and had got us a bit wandering. From the ups and downs of this exhilarating day, here we are, bushed from a day on a town that never stops demanding, yet bubbly with a kind of sweet miserableness.
One of the other guys in this large room for ten where Mafoya and I sleep talks a little too loudly on his phone to/about his boyfriend/admirer in an often not too discreet manner. Sigh, will we survive it?
The free coffee provided in the first floor of this almost ten storeys building is one of the crappiest in the world. But since I’m not such an addict in the first place, I should survive, I think.
Our room – a ten-bed suite for the males – for a reason beyond my explanation bears the number 419, a curious number to have as two African students in a foreign land as this. For now, it is our inside joke. And so, we will survive.
Tomorrow will find us back on the streets, seeking out the treasures of a place that could boast of the likes of Barack Obama, Ernest Hemingway, Jeniffer Hudson, Hillary Clinton, Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jordan, Louis Armstrong, and yes, Kanye West among its notable citizens. The city has welcomed us with open arms. Its time to ravage it. Let the day break.
Today, I went to the Principia College, Elsah Illinois with two professors from SIUe and another international student from here. Retired Professor Wilson had been invited to give a talk on diversity to a few students in the University, and it turned out to be a nice experience. The campus of the College (called University in Nigeria) is located at a site off the river road and overlooking the great Mississippi River. No words can describe the grandeur of the river as seen from the road while driving. I’m much convinced that it would look and feel so much better while on a bicycle. According to Prof Wilson, Mark Twain the writer used to come over to the river to get inspiration. Oh well.
The journey to Principia took a little over thirty minutes from the SIUe campus, and we had to pass through a few small towns including Alton and Elsah, each with a repertoire of historical information, especially about the Native Americans that made the area their habitation for many years before their forceful dispersal. Alton has the famous Clark Bridge, and the even famous painting of a prehistoric piasa bird on the face of the cliff also overlooking the Mississippi river. According to Wikipedia, Alton has “its steep-sloped streets filled with silos, railroad tracks, and brick commercial buildings”, and it counts among its famous former residents Miles Davies, the legendary trumpeter/musician, Elijah Lovejoy, an abolitionist who was murdered in 1937 for his role in anti-slavery movements (and after whom the Library at SIUe is named), and James Earl Ray, the murderer of civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jnr.
One of the notable sights on the way from Edwardsville are the many oil refineries in Illinois that litter the way. “Those refineries refine the crude oil from Nigeria”, the professor quipped “before they are sold in the United States at different rates.” The crude oil is brought from different parts of the world – and indeed from Nigeria – in large ocean vessels, are refined, and sold as “gas”. What he didn’t know until I told him was that the finished petroleum products are also sold back to Nigeria – like chocolate products – at exorbitant prices whenever the steam engines of Nigeria’s refineries go down and the continent’s petroleum giant finds it hard to refine its own products. Passing through those areas of Illinois that I’ve never been before only reminded me of Nigeria’s Niger Delta: plenty smoke in the air, and plenty smell of gas – a depleting environment under serious gas pollution.
The Principia College is an institution for