Skip to main content

Penultimate Milwaukee


Immediately after arriving in Chicago on a red-eye, I was faced with a daunting (for me) 2-hour drive to Milwaukee with little sleep. Normally, I refrain from drinking coffee because I want to avoid dependence on the beverage and my sleep schedule is good enough that I don’t need it. However, on 4 hours of rest, I needed something to tide me over. So, I broke the drive into two parts – one to a Starbucks midway between Chicago and Milwaukee and then from there to our Airbnb. I went in and bought a Frappuccino, but not cream-based as I normally do. I could feel the coffee taste, which I was not fond of, so I assumed the drink would give me a caffeine boost. Later, as multiple friends informed me, I realized that a Frappuccino is pure sugar, and barely has any caffeine. But I guess the placebo effect worked, since it kept me awake till Milwaukee.

Felipe and I returned to the Midwest separately after returning to our respective homes for the July 4th break. We didn’t have any meetings on the Monday, so we were able to rest up and get ready for the three big meetings over the next few days.

In our meeting with one of the top private companies in the US, a major construction supply company, the originally scheduled 30-minute meeting stretched out to 2.5 hours. The CEO himself took two hours out of his schedule to explain the company’s philosophy and take us on a tour of the headquarters and facilities. We were really amazed by this experience because in our experiences thus far, never had an executive spent so much time answering our questions about their business. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to form a partnership with the company, but the care that they showed definitely left an imprint on us.

Milwaukee was not as successful as we would’ve liked, but we were excited to finally get to Chicago to spend the rest (and bulk) of our summer. After hitting 10 cities in 5 weeks, we were ready to settle down in one spot and spend more than 4 days in the same apartment. I was, in particular, excited by the prospect of no more driving!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Revelations in Detroit

When Felipe and I arrived in Detroit two weeks ago, we encountered the first challenge of our ten weeks together this summer – renting a car. As 19-year-olds we can only legally rent a car in Michigan or New York, the reason we are starting this summer in Detroit, but that ability comes with a $50-a-day fee for underage driving. Thus, our rental car bill got an addition of $1600 and only one of us could drive. As the US citizen, and at the time, the only one legally able to work due to visa issues, I took on that role. I quickly realized that I absolutely hated driving more than an hour. On Monday, a drive to the Dow Chemical headquarters in Midland took two hours each way and left me feeling completely exhausted. By Thursday, I had given up on driving solo the whole summer, and we went back to Thrifty to add Felipe as a secondary driver. Other than the challenges of driving, Detroit was amazing. We came in with low expectations for the area, and left completely astound...
1 comment
Read more

A Pleasant Trip to Columbus

From Pittsburgh we headed back to Ohio, to Columbus this time. We arrived on Saturday afternoon and decided that we would catch a movie that night. The theatre at Easton Town Center was a dine-in AMC, meaning that you can order food from your seat and waiters will bring whatever you ordered directly from the kitchen to you. We watched Shaft, which was actually hilarious, but we spent more time admiring the mall itself. Easton Town Center has most of the big clothing brands, all the major restaurant chains as well as some local ones, and most importantly for our purposes, plenty of free parking. In my opinion, the mall was nicer than many of the malls that I had been to in California. In one of my meetings I learned that the mall was a major development of Les Wexner, the CEO of L Brands, and that it had once regularly hosted Victoria’s Secret fashion shows. We ended up going to the mall every day that we were in Columbus to spend time in between meetings because o...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Crazy Day in Cincinnati

Felipe and I were really excited for our stay in Cincinnati because we had booked a 4-star hotel through Hotwire in the heart of downtown. I freaked out slightly on the ride there because I was nervous about the age required to check-in. Luckily, those nerves proved unneeded and we were able to get our room with no problem. That calm, however, didn’t last. Felipe’s work permit had arrived in Princeton the previous day, so there was a debate on how best to get it to the Midwest. Overnight shipping was cheaper, but there was a chance that the permit could get lost and the entire process to get it would need to begin again, an exceptionally disastrous situation. The other option was for Felipe to fly to Princeton from Cincinnati, pick up the permit, and then fly directly to Indianapolis. Obviously, this plan would be much more expensive, not to mention seemingly wasteful of time, but it would definitely secure the permit. Eventually, the risk of losing the permit...
Post a Comment
Read more