Finding My Colors
I began my walk at state/lake where I usually connect to a green line to the clinton station but for the purposes of this walk decided to walk instead. At first I was having a hard time finding good matches for my items and had wished I took a darker shade of green because it hard finding green objects in the particular shade I had chosen especially in an urban area like the Loop. Soon enough I looked across the street and found a match. It was a light green Toyota Camry and I realize that this was probably the only time I’ve been happy to see a car in that shade of color. Just a personal thing I guess but I really don’t like that color. I took the picture of it with my paint chip hoping the owner wasn’t closeby watching becaause explaining why I was taking a picture of his car would’ve been difficult. As I kept walking I saw a Walgreens and decided to go in so I could possibly find something to match. I saw a yellow bag of Flamin’ Hot Funyuns sitting on the shelf reminding me of many childhood memories including long road trips with lots of bags of chips so I knew what I had to do. The lady at the checkout was very nice and $2 later I had not only a match to my color but a bag of chips to enjoy on the rest of my walk.
(photo of trees) As I kept walking I found it really hard to match things to my shade especially once I got about halfway there so I just kept walking noticing differents signs and realized how little yellow and light green there was in the city. I started to look desperately and I found some plants with leaves that resembled my shade of green so I was relieved because I was kind of on a dry streak there. It was a nice area close to the Clinton stop where it smelled nice due to the restaurants around the corner. The area was very clean and the trees looked well kept. Now that I was done with green I had pretty much given up on yellow until I was justa bout to get on my train and I looked down and I found exactly what I was looking for. The rugged edge of the platform towards the train was the shade of yellow I needed. I grabbed my paint chip and quickly took the picture explaining the blurriness and hopped on the train. The conductor looked at me weirded out by the fact I was taking a picture of the platform with a paint chip next to it but he moved on quickly. I can safely assume that a person taking a picture of the platform was definitely not the weirdest thing he saw that day. Satisfied now that I got all 4 of the pictures I needed I sat down and took the train home.
Written Response: A map is one visual perspective of a place in the real world used as a tool to navigate and understand it. Krygier and Wood define a map as a proposition of a place though it is not the actual place itself. Maps are relative because they depend on the creater the perspective that was taken to create it. A quote that I think reflected this best was “Because maps are propositions, you must accept responsibility for the realities that you create with maps…” This quote shows that maps don’t simply reflect our reality but create one of their own because that map may resemble a country, city, or place but it actually is a created reality of its own. We create maps to simplify a complex place like a city and take it in a universal angle that can be understood by all. When someone looks at a map, chances are they will be looking at the same exact image as the next guy but when someone looks at a city, there are endless possibilities as to what they could see. This sense of universal understanding take away a lot from the image of a city but at the same time develop a simpler way to understand and remember the locations and existence of places in it (218 words).
