This is not the end, just a thank you

Apologies for the low volume of posts recently. I have some more stuff to post but I have been ridiculously busy. Tomorrow tho, I will be on holiday and will be travelling about & will hopefully have some more stories to tell. But, enough about me. I just met a friend for coffee & it got me thinking about my time here and the people I have met.

I just want to say this, thank you to everyone who has touched my life in some way while I have been here. Whether you just came up and chatted to me, whether you invited me to meet your friends and spend an evening with you. Whether you indulged me by coming to an American Football game with me or some other random thing I wanted to do. You made more of an impact on my life than I probably did on yours. Most likely none of you know quite how much it means to me to have had people reach out, almost strangers, and offer that arm of friendship and companionship. Having offers to join people on different occasions, even just for coffee makes what can essentially be a lonely existence, so much brighter. Thank you & if you are ever my side of the world, wherever that is, I would love to return the favour!

Things I see out and about

Today was Labor Day here. According to Wikipedia it is supposed to be a celebration of the American Labor movement and is similar to Vappu in Finland (May 1st). The two however are marked rather differently, mostly due to the differences in drinking culture. In Finland, Vappu = hangover from the night before. My impression was from colleagues that people here use it as an opportunity to spend time with friends and family and have BBQ's.

I celebrated Labor Day by waiving my day off in favour of working on the course that I am organising this autumn in Finland. I did however make it to the beach with the friend who came to the football with me. Possibly one of the last beach opportunities that I will have in Evanston. I even made it into the lake for a swim and it was COLD. The ice bucket challenge has nothing on the temperature of the lake water this year. Chicago experienced an exceptionally bitter winter this year and a cool summer (i.e. not 35C and 95% humidity for two months), which means that the lake has barely warmed up. I tried swimming and barely lasted a few minutes since my fingers were starting to feel funny.

Campus area over the summer. If you look closely you can see the Chicago skyline in a couple of the pics. I just love the shark in the centre photo.

Anyway since Saturday's architecture post had some pretty big hits I figured you guys might want to see some of the places that I saw on my run north to the Baha'i Temple, including Evanston's very cute Grosse Point Lighthouse. The top set of pics are what I have seen on various runs around the campus area.

Evanston's Grosse Point Lighthouse, some other houses I saw on my run yesterday. Bottom right are some of the sorority & fraternity houses on campus.

Tomorrow it is back to work as usual to start the second to last week before I finish up here in Evanston.