Blurblog

Well, Sorry about this post being nearly two days late. It’s been a hectic since I arrived with many new and interesting things going on every single day. The following is not necessarily as fresh in my mind as today’s events are, hence I remember those events as it happened 2 days ago =P

Well, I recovered from the previous day’s travels quite well and really didn’t have much of a problem jumping up to take on this new and strange city… Hah! Just kidding. I actually slept in until around noon and ended up finally convincing myself that there were better things to do than stay in a crappy fold out.

Oddly enough, I was not craving the coffee I so desired the night before. So I got up and just started on a my own journey around the ‘Windy City’ to become more familiar with city life. One of the first thing I noticed about the city was that it was very clean and very well designed based off of a grid traffic system. This made it quite easy to take directions from anyone with a slight familiarity with the city. I set course toward any general direction that felt appealing at the time and I ended up within sight of the docks and eventually found myself on the edge of a spectacular view of Lake Michigan and the Chicago River, but no where near the docks.

Turning from my newfound courtyard with-a-view (near a couple of apartment towers with pricing in the $300,000-$1.5 millionish range), I passed a peculiar looking elevator that led down to a extraordinarily large park with many fountains, beautiful landscaping, and a certain serenity that almost seemed to make you forget that you were in such a large and noisy city. Unfortunately this park only had two entrances: The path that generally went back toward the way I came from, and the clearly wrong path that went the opposite direction desired. However this was indeed, no where near the docks.

Making my way back toward the hotel, a sign of significant interest caught my eye, one that read “To Lake Front”. Bingo! But there was only one catch, this was a stairwell that lead to a darkness I wouldn’t even know about until I went down myself into it. You’ve know the movies where you know something’s going to happen when the main character walks down the basement stairs and the eerie music is playing in the background? Yeah, it was that kind of a situation, turns out it was just a simple stairwell going to the roadway underneath. No biggie. Continued to walk in the general direction of the docks and eventually ended up there with no problems and it was well worth taking those steps down the stairs =P

I spent a good amount of time looking around the docks and at the view of the lake. The area was relatively well trafficked with a good amount of tourists touring, athletes jogging, and a couple of Chicago Police patrols. At one point there was a very strong wind that almost caused me to lose balance while walking out to the pier. They don’t call this the ‘Windy City’ for kicks. Nonetheless, I enjoyed every minute being under the sun and the cool winds breezing by until it was time to up and go to whatever else felt necessary to tourize.

On my way back, I managed to catch a rare site of where some of the homeless and/or panhandlers go for the night to sleep. In the same under ground roadway, there is a concrete divide separating the road and sidewalk from some open area. A string of perhaps 5 sleeping bags complimented by 7-up bottles, radios, a 14 inchish TV, books, newspapers, etc. I always wonder about how much beggars make a year and I found this report earlier today that mentioned that successful beggars can make anywhere from $30-40k a year. Not a bad living assuming that they don’t spend it all on alcohol or drugs. I found it to be a brief and interesting look into what life is like at the bottom of society. There are so many cases like this around the US.

Well, this post is already running a tad long so I’d best summarize and finish up the day. I ultimately found myself back at crowded courtyard and watched a neat jazz band perform while checking my email, chilling out and resting. I soon returned back at the Hard Rock hotel where I quickly dressed up and made my way over to the buses that were shuttling over 7000 FBLA delegates including myself to a local college for our General Opening Session.

But before that, Coach and I had decided that we were going to some Chicago-Style pizza before-hand. And so we found ourselves at Gordanos! We had some of the best stuffed pizza around and enjoyed every bit of it. It’s incredibly filling however it was incredibly slow to come by. Our wait time ran around 45 minutes after we had ordered, so it instantly became a first choice for killing time and second choice for getting a decent pizza in a decent amount of time.

The line to board was incredibly long and we ended up waiting about 20-25 minutes before actually getting on a bus. With some time, we finally arrived at the session and I have to say that it was VERY well prepared and done. All of the advisors, competitors and officers from Georgia were in one area while the remaining American states and territories were in their assigned areas. It started with FBLA awards for chapters and officers, then we had Eddie Slowikowski as a keynote speaker. He was very inspiring and entertaining as he also did a ‘Evolution of Dance‘ mimic called the ‘Revolution of Dance‘ at the end. We finished up with some speeches from up-and-coming officials that are looking to be elected as officers in the upcoming year, however after the keynote there were very few attentive ears around.

That’s pretty much my Thursday in a nut shell. However to give you an update of today (Saturday, June 30), I took my test today and I will be submitting some revised materials to the test center of FBLA. Some of the questions today were absolutely irrelevant to the subject, and I’m sure there are many others that also agree with me. It’s difficult to study for a test that doesn’t follow any guidelines as to how Cyber Security is supposed to be defined and pulls several questions out of hat that relate to something computer related. Given that there are several questions that do relate to Cyber Security, however you would have some difficulty passing the exam only following Security+ study guides. We’ll see how well this test really does when scores come back tomorrow.

In closing, I hate my bed.

Night!

Galleries - Day 1 - Day 2

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Well Just a quick update for the moment. I once again returned late after seeing the Blue Man Group’s performance and needless to say it was outstanding. I will provide more details about what all it was about when I have the time to finish day 2’s post =P (I’m just about done with it)

Some other key notes of interest that I did today was take a tour of the northern part of Chicago, Go to the ‘Tastes of Chicago’ Festival (Which involves many of Chicago’s big restraunts of different varieties sampling out food to tickets), Walk to the Sears tower and climb 103 stories to the top floor (By Elevator of course), walk a good 8-10 miles, and study for my Cyber Security Exam at sparse points during the day.

Test starts at 11:15 AM CST, so wish me luck. =]

Will update in the morning. Really tired =’(

Night <3

Well, I finally made it to Chicago, it’s been a long day so far and probably the best word to describe it is hectic. Day first started off with about a 4 hours of sleep and then fishing packing up. Shortly after 10:15 AM, Coach Olney, my advisor for the event, and I departed for the airport. We managed to get the last covered parking spot after only a short wait at a local parking lot and shuttled over to the airport. It was really a smooth process checking in, going through the security lines (flashing my id seemingly to every TSA official I passed), and getting to the gate with a good 2 hours down time before our departure at 2:15.

Killing time was especially unamuzing, every other terminal had a booth giving away free airline tickets to anyone who would sign up for their VISA rewards miles card. At one point, I had even accepted some rather dull (but free) reading material from these stands and I probably know more about that card than the people trying to get others to sign up. What a crappy card. However that fun came to an eventual end as we boarded our plane and was nearly completely surrounded by other FBLA competitors and advisors. We took a rather ‘rough’ trip to Chicago. However taking off into turbulence for the first 10 minutes or so and a rather bumpy landing, we ended up in Chicago well enough as we had started.

At the time we arrived, the weather was partly cloudy and very sunny. We walked about 40 miles, ended up at baggage claim, eventually received our luggage and finally managed to make it to the bus. We sat in the bus for another half an hour waiting on some others and watched the sky in the background start to get darker and more grey with each passing minute and eventually it started to downpour on us as we started to shuttle our way in.

The outskirts of the city weren’t necessarily the sight to behold in Chicago, however the downtown scene is what I was impressed with. Many specialty shops, coffee shops and bakeries, and a Starbucks on every other corner. Oh yeah, definitely getting coffee in the morning. We checked into our rooms after some delay and kicked back for a few minutesn. Looking out the window of the 6th floor, you can actually see the Chicago Tribune peaking out over the roof of the building across the street. After that, we set off to the streets of Chicago.

So my advisor and I walked around half-starved in hopes of finding some good Chicago style Pizzaria… And we found one, with a wait time of near an hour. Well that wasn’t going to do… The smell of food in the air (much less incredible Chicago style pizza) was enough to craze a person. So we found a local sub shop around the corner, afterall it just wouldn’t seem fitting to travel some 600 miles and eat at a Subway or McDonalds. Afterwards we just kept walking around until we had to meet up at the conference center for a Georgia FBLA meeting.

It lasted about an hour and 45 minutes and it just went over who the Georgia FBLA officers are, the ground rules, and other materials that we had not received up to that point. Immediately following I spent some time on the ground meeting up with some people I had met back when I had to head up to Dalton for test corrections and to get more information in regards to the trip. I met up with them and we went to go chill out at a, SUBWAY! (I know that I had said it wasn’t fitting to travel far and eat fast food, but I had already had dinner =P )

On the way over to Subway however, I did see a couple of musicians playing on the street corner of Michigan Ave. They played some cool blues rythms that seemed to echo even over the street noise and traffic. Just another noteworthy neat thing =]

Side Note: One thing I have most certainly noticed at this point (and I’m sure this is in every city), but there are a good number of beggars around on various street corners and walls. In fact, the first one that I walked by lit up a cig while he was begging us for change.

Tip. When begging, do not consume things that are looked down upon society. This reflects how you spend your tax free income.

Well, I’m off to bed. Night.

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