Yesterday
I went to Detroit with my friends Nicole, Felicity, and Adam. Nicole loves
Detroit, and she really likes sharing it with other people, even though it’s
virtually an American Glasgow. I’ve been to Detroit a few times for service
learning, or, for working with fifth grade students, getting them revved up for
college, and teaching adults and immigrants how to read, write, and pass the
TOEFL (that darned test you need to take to prove that you speak English
passably well). But yesterday was my first time actually wandering around
Detroit without a chaperone, and yesterday was Adam’s first visit.
Cheers
for Adam, for overcoming his fear of Detroit.
Our
first stop was the DIA, because Felicity has a homework assignment for Art
Appreciation that involves her writing a two-page paper on any piece of art she
prefers. She and Nicole were very good about taking everything in stride, and
making comments on all of the art, and I felt like I was back in the Toledo Art
Museum with my sister and her art teacher, discussing the brush strokes of Manet.
I let them wander around at their own pace, and looked at different Detroit-era
photographs. Some were of dashing women in T-birds, looking as if they had just
been killed, and some shows a Then & Now perspective of Detroit’s bygone
glory days compared to what stands now. One of my favorite photographs was of a
smoking woman wearing gloves and two long strings of pearls, and that gave me
an idea.
We
left Felicity in the main hall, drawing pictures of a suit of armor, and I
started going around playing Tag the Cute
Paintings, and took a picture of every cute guy I saw.
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| I think this guy wins the contest. |
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| They're twins! |
Unfortunately, I ran
out of cute guys and started tagging cute girls, and then I ran out of cute
girls and remembered that I had come with friends, so I turned my camera on
them.
They
were not good sports about it. Nicole told me I should just try playing Candid Camera, and taking pictures of
them when they least expected it, but then they got mad at me because I’d get
dumb pictures of them.
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| Sassy Adam, Thinking Felicity, and very Blurry Nicole. |
About
that time, we had seen van Gogh and the Egyptian art and the Renaissance stuff
and wandered through the really weird modern art exhibit, and I’d probably
threatened to hit Adam about fifty times, so Nicole and Felicity decided it was
time to go to dinner at the Hard Rock Café. We left, and drove into downtown
Detroit and found a parking garage, then went to lunch.
Since
it was Saint Patrick’s Day, everyone was in green, and all of the music being
played was Flogging Molly and Dropkick Murphys, with a few other songs
intermixed just to break the monotony up. I rocked out to some of my favorite
tunes, and got laughed at by Adam, and then basically daydreamed about Maggie
May’s for the rest of our stay, because American fries are really weird after
eating Belfast chips and the hamburger wasn’t nearly as good, and I kept remembering
milkshakes full of marshmallows. Everyone really liked their food but me, I
think.
After
dinner, Nicole decided we hadn’t seen enough of Detroit (and Adam kept asking
where all of the skyscrapers were too, Chicago boy that he is) so she took us
off on a very cold excursion through Detroit. Felicity kept running across the
crosswalks, and so we’d all have to follow her, and we ended up at the
Renaissance Center, looking at GM’s cars and wandering around.
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| The RenCen |
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| Canada!!! |
The best part
was going out by the Detroit River and seeing Canada. I would have loved to
stay and walk, but it was really cold and windy, and none of us had dressed for
a walk, so we went back to the car, and things sort of fell apart there,
because Felicity had forgotten to print out return directions to Madonna. Which
is okay, because usually you can just backtrack on the first set of directions,
but that didn’t work so well in Detroit, and to make a long story short we all
ended up on I-275 and Felicity almost had a breakdown, she was so worried about
all of us. None of us were particularly good at helping except for Nicole, who
was very calm and reassuring, but us kids in the back didn’t do much to help
Felicity out. But we all got home okay, if a little worse for the wear, and had
hot chocolate in Nicole’s room to relax.
