“Home is everything you can walk to.”
Immersion week was all about taking the first step into college life. Many of us at the beginning of the class were not familiar with the city that we’re going to college in and familiarity is really important in life. If we weren’t familiar with places and people, we wouldn’t feel safe, comfortable, or confident. This week helped me be more confident in a place that’s going to be really important to me for the next couple of years.

Yes, this is a picture of a construction site, but it shows a lot about the city of Chicago. The city is constantly being worked on, new roads, buildings, and sidewalks are constantly being built in the windy city. I noticed lots of construction sites on our walks around different neighborhoods, but most of them were in downtown itself rather than more quiet places such as Hyde or Rogers Park. I’ve driven on those downtown roads before and I wish they worked more on cleaning them and fixing all those pot holes considering the massive number of cars that drive on those roads every single day. It almost seems as if all that construction and road work is for nothing. I’ve always wondered how transportation is going to change in the following years, many articles have surfaced on the internet about underground road systems that’ll help cars travel at super-fast speeds. We can only hope for transportation like that one day.

When we went up the John Hancock Center to take a look at Chicago from up top, I could only think about how massive the city seems when we’re walking amongst it and how small it was when we were looking at it from afar. I’ve never appreciated Chicago as much as I did that day, thinking about all the years it took to build all those buildings from the ground up. It’s fascinating how centuries ago we would’ve never thought of a city like Chicago to be possible, but it proved to be possible. That made me think about what else might be possible in the coming years, the city could grow to have buildings double the height that they are now, with flying cars and trains that take you from one stop to another in the blink of an eye — what an incredible sight that would be.

This was from our first walk when we split into groups and just took off to wherever we wanted to go, we decided to go to the lake and on our walk encountered an open fire hydrant. Briefly after that we walked past a man who was randomly strolling by with an open tide detergent bottle — strange. The fire hydrant made me think about how you never know what you might find, that all of Chicago is a mystery and you’re bound to see something new every single day. By walking through various parts of Chicago, I opened up to noticing more things in life that I would’ve previously ignored.
“Home is everything you can walk to.” — Jerry Spinelli, Stargirl
