Adventures in Chicago

        To be able to study abroad in Spain for a semester, I had to make a trip to Chicago to apply for a visa in person. It was really stressful! There was a lot of paperwork that I needed to turn in and I was really nervous that I would forget something important, that tends to happen to me a lot. My appointment was July 3rd at 12:30. It was a bit of a tight fit with the holiday weekend, but we made it work. My dad and I packed up on the 2nd and headed to Chicago in the early afternoon. We made it there with out incident, we only had a minor problem with our GPS when we got in the city. We stayed in the Intercontinental on Michigan Avenue, a short walk from the embassy (the picture above is the view from our room). My dad has a friend in Chicago so we met him for dinner. He took us to an awesome pizza place (below) that I'll want to visit again when ever I make it back to Chicago.

          The next morning, we got up and had breakfast in the hotel and then decided to try and find the embassy to figure out how much time we would need to get there. We had to be out of the hotel room before my appointment and I didn't want to get to the embassy too early. We didn't have much success finding where we were supposed to go, but by the time we left the hotel there was still about an hour before my appointment.
          At first, we walked right past the embassy, it was in an unexpected place! It was in between the Citi Bank and the restaurant shown in the picture to the right. I was really nervous at this point. I had been told that it was a rather anticlimactic meeting, but it was still nerve-wracking. We took the elevator up to a tiny room that housed the embassy and I was a little underwhelmed. The room was pretty empty, there were some chairs set up in front of the windows where you handed in the application. We were pretty early, so I got to see a couple of other people hand in their stuff. It seemed pretty straight forward so I was less nervous. When it was my turn, the guy looked over my paperwork and then told me it would be about five weeks for me to get my visa. It was way easier than I had expected. With the application turned in, we promptly left Chicago.
         I had never been to Chicago before then, so it was really interesting to see everything. Chicago was definitely the biggest city I've ever been too and I'd like to go back some time to be able to appreciate it without so much stress.
         I leave in about 22 days from now, so I'll be updating again soon with my packing struggles and other fun things like that, so stay tuned!

Here are a couple of pictures I took when we were walking around in Chicago and then one of the lobby of the building that had the Spanish embassy!