Our family had a pretty normal day today. Not much going on with our schedule. Angela, Brittany and Carmen went for a morning run and said it felt very good to get out and exercise. Angela went to a surprise birthday party for one of her friends (Saundra Horne), books were taken back to the library, Brittany had her track practice, and Kirk went out with the Bishop to take care of some church business.
Carmen on the other hand, had another excursion where they got to go downtown again. Today’s excursion included shopping on the “Magnificent Mile” (Michigan Avenue) downtown, going to Millenium Park, and then watching an old movie in Grant Park outside on a huge screen with thousands of other people.
The Hancock Tower on Chicago's "Magnificent Mile." It is 100 stories and 1,227 feet (344 meters) tall.
Angela dropped her off just after noon and the group took the train downtown. Carmen enjoyed looking around at all the shops and just being in Chicago, but the shopping experience wasn’t too much fun for her. When you are shopping with 30 people, she said you don’t get a chance to try on anything or really find what you want. After 4 hours of shopping, she didn’t find anything which was a little frustrating because she got bored. She also mentioned how expensive things were (i.e. $60 for a t-shirt that some people were spending). She thought that this was crazy! She told me that there are some of the students who brought a thousand dollars in cash AND a Visa card with them and were spending insane amounts of money. She would rather spend her money at the Outlet Mall and get more things for less. One thing that she also thought was crazy was when they went in the Zara store. Zara is a clothing store that is big in Spain. Carmen said that in Spain, that store is common and the clothing is not overly expensive. She said that the clothes are extremely expensive here!
After shopping, they went to Millenium Park and spent most of their time taking pictures of the bean. The bean is very hard to describe other than a stainless steel sculpture that is wildly popular in Chicago.
Chicago "Bean" Sculpture
If you look very carefully in the picture below, you can see Carmen taking the picture…
Carmen is in the small group of three standing back from "The Bean."
Chicago's Millenium Park between downtown and the lakefront.
After strolling through Millenium Park, they went to Grant Park to watch an outdoor movie at night. A HUGE screen is set up outdoors at the park and thousands of people come downtown to watch these movies (usually black and white movies from the 50s). When they got there, Carmen and one of her friends (Elena) went to find a bathroom and when they returned, the food had been passed out and was all gone. They had missed dinner! 🙁 So they went looking for food and bought hot dogs from a nearby vendor. That frustrated her a little bit, but she said the hot dog was good!
She couldn’t hear the movie very well from where they were sitting, so they slept a little bit and both Carmen and Elena went walking around looking at things and taking more pictures.
They came back from Chicago on the train and I picked up Carmen just before midnight. All the kids were completely exhausted from the long day. Carmen said she had a fun time but it wasn’t her favorite excursion (due to the shopping experience, missing dinner, and not being able to hear the movie). Even though it wasn’t her favorite, she remained positive and happy.
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