Chicago

I'm at my parents' house now, but I just spent the past four days (well, the majority of the past four days) apartment-hunting in Chicago with hazelsteapot. It was encouraging. For one thing, we found an apartment we liked (actually, several, but this is a time when you kind of have to pick...). For another, we found friends!

We stayed with amazingly nice and generous people, one of whom Hazel had emailed when ze first started looking for grad schools in Chicago (a grad student at the Divinity school at U Chicago, sadly in a field unrelated to what Cedar wants to study, but listed as a contact for some trans stuff there), but neither of whom we had met before. They picked us up from the bus stop, introduced us to friends, fed us, and told us repeatedly to make ourselves at home. Furthermore, they were awesome to talk to and calming to be around. And told us about ghost tourism.

We also met up with a couple of people Hazel had met in Minneapolis who live in Chicago, but this was less exciting to me. Oh well.

And! We went to a grocery store which had a whole aisle of Eastern European food. I was fascinated. Enormous jars of sauerkraut and cabbage salad and pickled peppers, rosehip jam, paprika paste, and peach and plum juice... many many things which I liked to eat in Hungary, although they seemed to actually have come mainly from Russia and Poland.