Krystal Waters in Chicago

Last night was such a GORGEOUS evening! The weather was perfect for a night in Chicago. I traveled into the city because my friend Krystal drove in from Grand Haven, MI to visit some Chicago friends for a day. I met Krystal through Kim Klotz-Webster. Kim was a camp counselor at Lutheran Summer Music camps and Krystal was one of her campers. Kim eventually recruited Krystal to go to Valpo and pursure her Bachelors in Music- specifically, Vocal Performance. She is a girl after my own heart as she is not a chirpy sorprano voice but a nice, rich, mezzo maybe even really a contralto. This girl is good when it comes to singing and it really stunk that her senior recital was on the worst day of weather in my entire lifetime! Now I just need to wait until she is singing on stage with the Lyric Opera. It was awesome to see Krystal and walk around downtown. We stopped by the Summerdance festival and listened to some live swing music and watched some great dancers cut the concrete in grant park. I took some pictures which turned out okay, but would have been a lot better if i had a digital SLR with mega zoom on it and at least 10 mega pixels:) From there, we hiked it up to the Grand Lux Cafe which Krystal had surprisingly never been to before. We had great conversations about our future career direction, relationships with boys/girls, Chorale, etc. Then Michael Beaver arrived to the scene to join us. He is a friend of Krystal's who also went to Valpo. The conversation got really good then as I heard stories of how the Phi Delts are now kicked off campus and the Phi Mu Alpha's were under probation. I miss college:) Krystal had to leave unfortunately and return back to Grand Haven where many Harry Potter parties were raging strong as the new JK Rowling book was released last night. I returned to the "el" but made a few stops along the way to take some night time snap shots of the theater district. I got on the blue line at Randolph at the Daley center and then had to get off at Clark and Lake which was the next stop. Because of construction, part of the service is down so all those who needed to go in the direction of O'Hare had to take a shuttle bus from Clark and Lake to get back on the blue line at Western and Milwaukee. So my typical 30 minute train ride turned into a 5 min ride to a 7 min walk and wait to a 10 min bus ride to a 40 min train ride to a 15 min car ride. Needless to say, i returned home at about 1:30am. Despite the commute home, the night was fantastic and I am so blessed to have Krystal as a friend:)