We are Finally Going to Start Class Soon!

My slice of combo style deep dish pizza.

Amazingly, today was a semi-free day. For the first half of the day, there was nothing planned in the itinerary until the afternoon and thus we had time to explore Chicago even more. Although there was a slight change of plans around 1:00 AM, where Chan-Law told us that we were checking out at 10:00 AM and leaving our luggage in storage so that we could freely roam about the city. What was even better than not having to care about our luggage, was that we had thirty more minutes to get prepared, since we were originally going to meet at 9:30 AM. I was relieved to hear this, basically giving us even more time to sleep in, since we have not had enough sleep for the past few days. After we all met in the Drake Hotel's lobby, Chan-Law booked us out and stored our luggage. Afterwards we went to go get a quick drink at a nearby coffee shop, just adjacent to the hotel and there I had my first cup of iced Chai tea--and it was phenomenal. I drank it up extremely fast because I was thirsty and it was delicious. Right after this we began to explore the city of Chicago as two nearly equal proportioned groups and agreed on meeting at East Gino's at 11:45 AM.

Great shots of Chicago from above.

Unfortunately as the only male in the cohort, I was dragged along to clothing stores that quite did not fit my taste. First we went as a group to Topshop, as all the girls in my cohort were having fun attacking the sale area. They told me to go the male third floor, so I did and found that their sale section did not have a very good selection--therefore I bought nothing. My cohort eventually got fed up with the expensive prices of Topshop and splintered to a makeup place in the mall and H&M right across the street. I decided to tag along to H&M where I surprisingly bought sunglasses and a shirt to match. A funny thing that occurred was that the shirt I was wearing that day is dyed from the inside so that it has a faded look from the outside, thanks to me not paying attention in the fitting room, I put it on inside-out and only after completing my purchase I noticed my fault. I quickly ran back into the fitting room all embarrassed and changed it as quick as I could, avoiding all eye contact.

Extremely close to Philly ground.

Going over to the Chicago style pizza, Gino's East knew how to make their pies. I remember seeing the restaurant from TV and how delicious their pies looked. We started off with some appetizers including hot wings, fried calamari and bread sticks. One thing to worry about was that we had to be at the hotel at 1:15 PM because that would be when our shuttle would arrive to take us to the O'Hare. Going back to the pizza, there was peperoni, four cheeses, heaping piles of tomato sauce, and even a thick sausage patty in the middle of the combo. It was delicious, but we had to eat extremely fast. 

Once we got to the shuttle phase, we encountering crazy traffic like the Bay Area and we nearly all fell asleep in the van at some point. It literally delayed our timing by more than 45 minutes. Either way we rushed out of the car once we got their and unpacked immediately and ran to check-in weigh in. Towards the end of all the mandatory checking, we ended up with more than hour of free time since we expected the worse at O'Hare.

Propeller plane.

We then transferred flights from the Chicago flight to Philadelphia plane to the Philadelphia to Ithaca plane. Meanwhile I snacked on a tikka massala burrito from the airport. When we did finally arrive to Ithaca at 10:35 PM. I just wanted to unpack my items so I could accommodate myself to my new home. Much work lays ahead of me and I'm reviewing my readings.

I forgot to take a picture of this earlier since I talked about it in the beginning.