yyt

since i am shackled to the school over the summer - a heinous bit of sadism the contract states that i have to be there one day a week for three hours and be a bobble head doll at three meetings - i reckoned that i should make the best of this time so that i am not blindly racing to and from the train or wasting time until i have to race to and from it.

reversing my working method during the autumn when i had to come down for an evening class and merge this with the bus tag that i play with a day pass in baltimore.

it was a good day try it out as i was beginning to waste the afternoon with indecision. hopped on the harrison street bus - it was either that or the jackson boulevard which ever came first - to its western terminus then return via the one i didn't catch for the return trip.

a bit slow at first to the extent that i almost fell asleep, as the bus crawled through the extended uic campus. i thought that i would see more neighbourhoods - urban ones not the transplanted suburban ones that are now being built in cities.

breakthroughs came when i got down from the bus around california to make a snap of an abandoned shopping cart not realising i was across from a shelter. while waiting for the next bus made some snaps of other things left behind as well as churches in the area while being watched by those awaiting the shelter to open. the getting down was important as i find it easy to be passive and to simply keep going. buses especially buses at busy intersections allow some aspect of security as there is the feeling that i can hop on whatever comes if the need arises - although i cannot imagine anything coming close to north and pennsylvania avenues or monroe street and wilkins avenue in baltimore.

the ride through the west side of chicago also humanised the area. it could be that i was expecting the worse, frankly i don't what i was expecting except for a lot of vacant lots, as the area seems to have been forgot in the local media, but what i found were families picking their kids up from school, people heading out shopping, pockets of urban renewal not really all that different than what the trendy areas of the city looked like a few decades ago. the people had the same aspirations and were simply poorer.

trepidation only came when neighbourhoods openly addressed crime - the blue police lights at dangerous intersections and, ironically, at the beginnings of blocks where the houses were better kept up and thus felt safer, with their signs on their prohibition of the selling of drugs, loitering, cruising etc. it was in these places that i felt nervous seeing when i saw people hanging about.

a walk up austin and into columbus park until a jackson boulevard bus heading back into the loop arrived. the four blocks separating the two rides had me thinking i was in different parts of the city as the return trip was more of what i thought the west side to be