Out of towners

The drive into Illinois was crowded and hot. Little did I know that it was only going to get worse. The drive from Wales to Chicago was only 2 hours, but it still was very exciting to see Chicago signs.

Like all of the Midwest, Illinois is very beautiful and very green. Even in the city

We found our apartment and luckily our land lady was there to greet us. Again. The NICEST person I have ever met in my entire life. She is so genuine and so excited about Chicago. She just wants to make sure that we love it as much as she does and that we adapt quickly. She is very kind and super helpful always sending us emails or just dropping by when she thinks of new things Kelsey and I could do. It is so nice to have our own personal Native. I really feel like she is our friend and I am grateful to her. She also has a dog named Dolce, that Kelsey obviously loves.
Once we got the tour and unloaded all of our stuff (as quickly as possible because the trash bags seemed especially white trash in our neighborhood!!!) , Ethan and I were trying to plan what we wanted the day to look like and looked over to find this...

Kelsey just made her self right at home. She was so happy to be out of the car and so happy to be in Chicago that she made our decision easy. We weren't going to tour today, we were only going to get situated and explore our neighborhood.

We were sick of eating out so we decided that we were going to stock our pantry. We hopped in the car and headed to the nearest Walmart. Our only goal was to avoid the city because we were still so new at driving. We typed in Walmart on Ethan's GPS and took off. We were so new that we just blindly followed the GPS. Ethan's doing great and then all of a sudden cars are whizzing by us. Streets that are supposed to be 2 lanes are three where cars fit, taxis are honking at us, buses are cutting us off, and there are people everywhere! We finally started paying attention to the city and noticed that it was getting bigger and bigger. Little did we know, but we were headed right for the heart of the city underneath the train tracks! This is when the laughter kicked in which didn't help anything.

The mission got aborted but I did get some great pics. It still weird to me that stores look like this. I mean have you ever been to a Target or grocery store with a parking garage. AND some of the parking garages only let you park there if you pay!! Crazy right?

Well, I at least got to glimpse the city but we turned around so fast that it didn't last very long. We couldn't have looked more like out of towners. We were so out of our league. We got home and WALKED to the nearest restaurant that we could find which luckily was Subway.

After dinner, we started walking around our neighborhood trying to get a feel for the area. We found a school with a playground a block away and that is where our walking tour ended for the night.
I love the schools here. I have never really seen big city schools and so they all just blow my mind. Some are older than others, but all of them have at least two levels. Most have more.

The school had turf instead of grass and the students had painted old tree stumps for some of their play equipment.

 

This picture was taken because we were so blown away that she was actually eating. We think the no eating phase is past for now. In Wales she had two pieces of salmon and had a whole sandwich in the car. This is a huge deal for us.

And Fran is a women after my own heart. She had a gift basket waiting for us when we arrived and there was popcorn and caramel corn waiting inside. It was a great night.