Walking in a Loop
Living in Chicago for the past eighteen years, you begin to feel like you have seen everything that the city has to offer, resulting in your life becoming a daily routine. Even though you might not go to the same place everyday, you never stop to look around. Another way to look at it, is if you were given a maze and was told how to get from start to finish, you would never take a different path and see where that takes you because you are so focused on getting to the end. Recently, I am enrolled in a walking Chicago course that focuses on simply walking. You might wonder why a person who has lived in Chicago would take a class on walking the city they call home and my answer is to explore and adventure. With the example of the maze, instead of going to point A to point B, I want to look around and discover each path of Chicago’s streets.
Exploring Chicago, the first thought that crossed my mind was downtown or what some people call the loop. The loop represents to me both the past and the future. While I was walking around the city at different points I would have flashbacks of my childhood or remember little memories of the past that would give me joy. As for the future being in college at DePaul University, my next four years will be more active in the loop campus and looking towards future internships or jobs.
One of my favorite landmarks of the city is Cloud Gate but with all of the tourist and natives of Chicago we call it The Bean because of it’s shaped more as a bean than a cloud. When the sculpture first appeared it was the place to be. The location was perfect in Millennium Park where you get a 360 view of the skyline and no matter what time of the day you always have a great photo. The cool effects of the sculpture being a mirror of the city is that walking up to the bean you could see your own reflection making you apart of not only the art but Chicago as well. For every time I visited the bean my favorite part is walk directly under and look up. As you look up with all of the curve reflections it feels as if you where looking into a kaleidoscope. The landmark is one of my favorite places because it’s so simple but there is nothing else in the world like it.
Walking around Millennium Park, a place that brought memories was the Crown Fountain. The fountain was made before the bean and is described as two LED screen brick sculptures facing each other on top of a granite reflecting floor of water. The cool part about the screen is that it shows local residents of Chicagoans which brings the city together even more and shows Chicago as a community. As a kid on a hot summer day I remember taking my shoes off and running to each block waiting for the sculpture to pour out water and watch it all disappear again. When coming back with my class, I realized how the fountain is like a melting pot of diversity of seeing people of all color, hearing different languages, and no matter what age enjoying the view of children smiling as they play.
Growing up in Chicago the building that you see in the picture above is now called The Willis Tower but to me will always be referred to as The Sears Tower. One memory I have as a child is that my parents used to laugh because I would call it the serious tower until I was about six. For a field trip our school visited the top of the tower and was always fascinated on how the city looked like from above seeing the cars and the people becoming the size of an ant. On a clear day you are able to see as far as the state’s borders and really get the understanding of how big the city is to explore and how much there is to discover.
