The Windy City and my weekend-traveling marathon

Howdy folks!

I admit, I have been a lame-O blogger lately, but here's an attempt at catching up.

Last weekend (as in Sept. 28-Oct. 1) I went to Chicago and it was pretty awesome. Here's the play-by-play:

Friday afternoon: Arrived in Chi-town and was greeted at the airport by my super cool bro. He took me to his place via subway, chatting the whole way there about his classes, particularly his "sight-screaming" (sight-singing) class which he had a test in that day, and just being his usual funny and entertaining self. He took me to his absolutely absurd dorm - guys, this is like luxury housing, I'm not even kidding, I think his kitchen and living area is the size of my entire dorm - and we chilled for a bit. Then we went out for Chicago-style stuffed pizza and Edwardo's, which was close by, and after a bit of deliberation we paid for it with Mom and Dad's credit card, since we figured if they were there, they would pay for it... (great reasoning, yes?) After that he showed me around downtown a bit - we saw his favorite jazz record store, which is incredible and clearly heaven-on-earth for jazz fans, visited a couple random bookstores, and walked up and down Michigan Avenue a bit on the Magnificent Mile. Didn't do any shopping, just walked around and saw the big water tower. After that we came home to, of course, watch a movie, since my brother now owns like a thousand movies. We watched The Terminal with Tom Hanks, which was really really good, and also watched Copying Beethoven but I fell asleep during that one.

Saturday - Woke up early-ish to meet up with Timo - my pastor from Berlin - to hang out with him for the day. Timo and Manu came to the States for their undergraduate degrees and studied at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, so the church in Berlin has lots of partner churches in the Chicago area (and also in Minnesota, where they did an internship), and thus he came to the U.S. for about 10 days to visit those churches and reconnect with some people. And I was lucky to be one of those people! We went down to Navy Pier, hoping to find a place to eat breakfast, but we were out of luck on that, so we just ate some chocolate in the car on the way out to the 'burbs to visit friends of his from Moody who had invited us for lunch. After hanging out there for awhile, we decided we wanted to visit Willow Creek Community Church - a rather famous mega-church also in the 'burbs - to hear Bill Hybels - a pastor and pretty well-known Christian author - preach. We had a couple hours to kill though, so on the way we stopped at Kohl's because Timo accidentally left his dress shoes in Berlin and didn't really want to preach in his tennis shoes. Then we headed to the church and got there early enough to look around a bit and chat with a friendly lady in the "welcome center". Visiting Willow Creek was a very interesting experience. I honestly don't know if I could ever go to a place like that - it's soooooooooooooooo big and sooooooooooooooooo nice - but it's also really cool how much influence the church has had and how many people they've been able to reach. Also, when you have that many people in your church, you can build up tons of ministries and have jillions of pastors. I think there's probably a pastor for every age-group - kids, junior high, senior high, college, young singles, married couples, seniors... Yeah. The service was interesting; some things we liked about it, some things we weren't crazy about. The sermon was pretty good though, and I thought Bill Hybels was a great speaker. We were pretty hungry after that, so we went to eat at the famous Ed Debevic's, a 50's-style diner where the servers are comically rude. It sounds weird, but it's really quite entertaining. We enjoyed ourselves. And then it was time to head home and hit the hay. Back at Jim's place I kinda just chilled before passing out on his couch.

Sunday - Up early again for church with Timo. First we visited the church he went to while he studied at Moody, then we jetted out to another church nearby where he had been asked to preach. He interviewed me in his sermon too, which was cool. Afterwards we were invited to lunch and met some cool people. Then he drove me back into the city, with a stop at the museum campus to enjoy the beautiful view of the city and the lake. From Jim's place I then dashed off to the U. of Chicago campus to visit my friend Elizabeth who was in Berlin with me, and I hung out with her for a few hours and had dinner with her and her boyfriend. Then I went back to Jim's to hang with him a bit more, and again passed out pretty early. My flight was first thing Monday morning.

All in all, it was an awesome weekend, but it went by way too fast! It was really great and very encouraging to see and spend time with Timo - I got the full update on everything happening at the church in Berlin, which is really exciting, and had time to just talk and hang out with a great mentor. The biggest disappointment of the weekend was not getting to hang out with my brother as much as I would've liked, but I'm hoping I'll get to do that again soon; he's gonna be in Chicago for 4 more years at least.

Other than the big trip, life has been good but crazy. School is so much work, and some of it is more exciting than the rest... I had my Fulbright interview today and that went well - keep your fingers crossed for me! This past weekend was the Campus Crusade retreat, which was good, and then this coming weekend I am going to New Orleans with Crusade people. I am excited but also a bit nervous about that.

That's pretty much it... Heh that was a lot, actually. Love to all!