The First Day

Good morning. This morning in the Schwarz house, I was able to walk out on my room's own balcony (niice!). The weather here is cool and foggy.I think all of us are sizing up the place and keeping mental notes for future houses we design. Right now we have three guys trying to cook eggs and cheese and I can hear them planning their plan of attack...lots of "whisk" being said. Frank Sinatra is playing softly in the great room which I feel pretty fitting for our group and the space. And Drew is playing a "good morning song" on Alaina's accordion. Also, we've figured out that taking a shower here is pretty complicated. There is one switch to clog the grain or open it (as usual), there is one knob to turn the water harder or softer, one knob to turn it from the shower to bath, and another knob to turn it hotter or colder. On the second floor, we couldn't figure out how to turn the water off; and on the bottom floor, they couldn't figure out how to get any.

Anyway, yesterday Elise and I arrived at Calder at 7:30 and all of us left between 8:15 and 8:30. Food was immediately taken out (even before we got off campus!). We went to Coloma to pick up Jamie and made a pit stop at our usual Indiana pitstop between campus and Chicago. As we went through Chicago, we got on a different piece of highway which happened to miss an hour-long traffic jam (thank God). And eventually we reached Milwaukee.

The 3rd Ward district of Milwaukee was pretty sweet. We decided it had a sort of Chicago/Grand Rapids feel with historical buildings and an artsy community. We kind of felt like outsiders because no one in the area walked in a group; and here we were a group of 12. We parked our car in the Historical Parking and literally went around the corner to the Irish Pub (sort of a tradition of ours). At the Irish Pub I had a baked potato with broccoli and cheese (but it was a TON of food and absolutely delicious)!

Afterwards, we went to the Eisner, took an interview of the two who run it, and then walked around to experience the museum. Then we went to a studio tour of a very famous advertising agency on the same block. I think we all got pretty pumped about the workspace. It was really relaxed, but professional. It made work look like fun.

After that half of us went on the stret to do interviews with random people and the other half got some coffee because they had already interviewed the Eisner people (I got coffee). Afterwards, we explored some of the 3rd Ward (because we've only really seen one block). Some of us tried to go see Fashion Ninja, a fashion boutique and school, but it was closed. We all went to the Iron Horse, a swanky hotel, just to see the atmosphere (we were told we must). Some of the guys went to get the van because we had walked through a really shady part of town to get there and it was now getting dark. The rest of us stayed and bought a drink (I had a glass of Pino Grigio--like I said, swanky).

We had a safe ride back to Two Rivers, but had to take a quick pitstop at a Subway to get food and go to the bathroom. I practially climbed over everyone to get there first. We arrived at the Schwarz house and looked around. Its pretty awesome that we get to "have" it for two days. We chilled for a while, and Anna, Fox, and I went to get some supplies for breakfast today. We ended up finding a gas station that had the stuff we needed, and I must say I've never seen that many bananas in a gas station in my life. It was as if they were stocking up for the apocolypse or something.

And on the way back (since we had already taken most of everything out of the van) Fox scratched the top of the van on the low porch ceiling. It was too dark to tell if there was a problem, but we all laughed nervously.

And, that's about all that's happened so far in a nutshell. Off to a new adventure--to the Hamilton Museum!