Back in high school

Friday, October 11th.

While Jens got to sleep in yesterday morning, Thursday, and spend the day watching movies and rearranging stuff in the van Dan got up early again and went to school with Wes. The Dean's secretary was more cooperative this time around and Dan was allowed to shadow Wes for the day. As if transported five years back in time he suddenly found himself walking the halls of his old school, going to class in the same old classrooms and eating lunch in that same old cafeteria again. Just the experience of being back in a classroom for the first time in a year and a half was a bit of a workout for the mind. Especially Wes' Spanish and pre-calculus classes really scratched the surface of things long archived or forgotten. It was neat to be back and all the teachers were really nice and enjoyed asking questions about Denmark and making a spectacle of the foreign visitor :)

During Wes' free period Dan got to track down a few of his old teachers to say hi and to hear how they were doing, which was a fun experience. Wes' history teacher, Ms. Plank, was the same (great) teacher that Dan had for history when he was there, so he got sit in on her class again which was really like a trip back in time.

That evening we drove down to the Northwestern University campus in Evanston to meet up with Rachel, one of Dan's friends from his year in Wilmette. She looked like herself, only older and cuter :) We hung out in her room for a while trying to decide whether or not it would be worth our time to try to get into a bar in town without either real or fake id's. We ultimately decided on a trip to the movies instead, so we piled in the van and headed for the movie theater, Dan and Rachel in front and Jens riding comfortably on the couch in the back :)

We saw "Red Dragon", the 'threequel' to "Silence of the Lambs". It was a disturbing experience, as intended, but was very well done and quite fascinating. After it was over we went back to the sorority house where Rachel lives and hung out in the kitchen/dining hall for a while. As we sat there small groups of more or less intoxicated girls kept coming in on their way home from town. And without exception they all seemed to go crazy upon discovering that the breakfast cereal buffet now included 'Count Chocula'; a kind of chocolate flavored Lucky Charms. Large quantities of cereal and milk were consumed and prompted loud and improvised songs to be sung about the virtues of chocolate cereal. It was quite amusing. And we were quite fascinated by the power of the cereal and agreed that we should definitely always keep large quantities of chocolate cereal in stock in our future apartment to lure girls to visit us :)

Back in Rachel's room we found some pretty funny tests on the internet that determined important stuff about us, such as which disease we would be if we were to be one and what animal would make the perfect blind date for us. The knowledge this left us with was really quite eye-opening. We said goodbye to Rachel and made plans to stop by on our way through town a few days later to get a couch picture together with her.

Although Wes had today, Friday, off from school he still had Cross-Country practice to attend in the morning. After he got back from that the three of us headed down to Evanston to have lunch at Buffalo Joe's, one of Dan's favorite haunts in the area. We devoured two double servings of their great buffalo wings and then stumbled out of there and decided to take a walk around the block before heading on. This led us to two different used cd stores and although they did not place high on a list compared with others we've been to all three of us bought something. After that we paid a visit to "Homer's" for a scoop of their homemade ice cream. Dan and Wes had the traditional scoop of peppermint stick ice cream while Jens went with a scoop of chocolate chocolate chip and topped it off with a banana split afterwards :)

Early that evening we hit the road again to go to Champaign, a couple of hours south of Chicago, to visit Dan's friend Susan who goes to the University of Illinois down there. We hit the rush hour traffic going through the city so the trip to a little longer than planned. But we made it to Champaign around 9:30 in the evening and met up with Susan. We got a tour of the neighborhood right away since we had to cruise around to look for a parking space. We found nowhere to park overnight though, so we ended up following Susan out to a big 24-hour shopping center on the outskirts of town and leaving our van overnight there.

We went back to Susan's apartment to have a drink (or two) and then headed over to a neighborhood bar. It was "Dads' weekend" at U of I, so the bar was not only crowded with college students but had a fair share of dads in there too. When the bar closed down at 1 o'clock we went to back to Susan's apartment to hang out for a while until we decided that we were hungry and headed over to the International House of Pancakes to wrap up the night with a really early pankcake breakfast.