Visiting Detroit

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. 

I think this guy wins the contest.

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.

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. 

The RenCen

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.