Scouting out the windy city

Is it weird that I feel more at home in Shibuya than I did in Chicago?

Previous to this trip, Seattle is just about the deepest I've gone into the USA. Seattle is pretty similar to Vancouver. Vancouver's restaurants are way better, and the American version of iced tea is silly, but apart from that the place felt pretty, you know, normal.

Chicago is a different story entirely. One of my first acts in the city was to catch a cab at O'Hare. They have a pretty nice set-up for cab-catching, complete with a shelter, place for a line up, and friendly attendants. When I joined the line, it was pretty short, consisting of two people (including me). So I stood there with an Asian businessman, and two attendants, one black and one middle eastern. It turns out some white guy wasn't familiar with the procedure at O'Hare, and had gone up the lane trying to catch a cab without standing in line. As they called him back, the black attendant made a joke something along the lines of "Isn't that the way, white guys always act like they run the place."

And that's when I realized I was in America.

Not that they didn't help make me feel at home. When I was standing in line waiting to get through immigration on my way in, an attendant called for Canadians to move over to the lines marked for US residents. How neighbourly! Mexicans were not offered similar treatment. Take that Mexico! No matter what Dubya says, Canada is still America's number one buddy.

The University of Chicago campus is great. Rockefeller wanted a real universityish feel for the place, so it's all made out to be fake-old, Oxford/Cambridge style. It's a pretty compact campus, and the majority of profs and students live within walking distance, which I guess makes it a pretty chummy place. It's situated in Hyde Park, a fairly low-income part of Chicago, and once you leave the campus, pretty much everyone is black. Meanwhile, no one I met in the Philosophy Department was a visible minority. (I'm trying not to get my mind stuck on the race issue, but they might as well have put a big neon sign over the city saying, "Race Is An Issue Here". The contrasts were stark. At O'Hare, the airport workers who show you which gate to go through are all poorly-trained black women; the more crucial job of conducting searches of people going through the gate is conducted by white people.)

Lake Michigan is within walking distance of the university. You know what? Lake Michigan is big. Really, really big.

I can't say I was really conscious for most of my visit. I pride myself on my ability to sleep and wake according to schedules which I set myself, circadian rhythms be damned, but 9 hour jet lag is not something that can be overcome through force of will alone. My itinerary consisted mostly of meals with grad students, and meetings with professors. Some of the profs could do with some coaching on how to be more inviting to prospective students, but, well, they're profs, what can you do.

I spent my nights on the remarkably comfy couch of one of the current first-year grad students, who has an apartment about twice the size of ours, with centralized heating. Centralized heating, oh how I have missed you. On occasion I was surprised to step outside and find it rather chilly. Do you know how refreshing it is to be unable to predict the outside temperature from inside your bedroom?

Without a doubt, the coolest thing I encountered in Chicago was live band karaoke. That's right: you sing, and a live band backs you up. They compensate if you screw up the timing of the lyrics, and they jump in to prop you up if you forget them entirely. Neither of which happened to me, of course, as I belted out a screeching version of White Rabbit.

Interesting linguistic fact: nobody in Chicago seemed to know the term "cougar", as applied to certain sorts of people you find in bars.

There's a bit more I could say about the place, and I would say it, except there's no need to rush since I've decided to accept UChicago's offer of admission.