Illini Soccer {and Young People with Backpacks}

Last Thursday we drove down to the University of Illinois to watch the Fighting Illini women's soccer team. It was a great experience and all three of the girls loved it. Illinois beat Michigan and there were all the highlights one could hope for in a live soccer match :: flip throw-ins, a yellow card, PKs, and our little girl kickers where a little amazed that even at a collegiate level handballs and offsides are a common part of the game.

{This is the only picture of our University visit!}

The night of the game was perfect, and really it was the last nice day weather wise we might have this fall ... Mild with a slight wind.

We stayed at the Illini Union Hotel, which doubles as the student Union. It was fun to be there on a weekday, so that we could see college life in action. When Bei Bei peaked out of our third story room Friday morning and glimpsed students with umbrellas rushing along the zig-zagged wet sidewalks of the Quad to make their 8 am classes, she quipped, "There sure are a lot of young people with back packs out there!"

{I love that girl!}

We did our obligatory trip to get new T-shirts.

EHJ got a fun one that reads :: I SEE ORANGE PEOPLE

Bei Bei opted for the chanting :: I-L-L I-N-I, the raucous cheer of every Uof I sporting event

and MGJ opted for a subdued university logo.

Like I mentioned. We took exactly one picture.

But in our mind we have many more.

And great memories of showing the girlies around our old stomping grounds. (Remember last year when we revisited our first meager apartment in married student housing? We drove by building #2112, and glimpsed lamplight in the familiar windows we once artfully hung bed sheets in as treatments.) We were glad we used the Nikon a little more liberally on our last trip to the campus, because this year the Alma Mater statue is MIA ... off being refurbished somewhere, and it really looks naked near the Illini Union!

Thursday night we ate at a great ethnic joint on Green Street and got a pre-game Bubble Tea. Friday morning we popped around the corner to a Korean place where we ordered take away for lunch. Bi Bim Bap and Bulgogi are not generally synonymous with 'car friendly', but we made a go of it and managed to even wield chopsticks on our route to our State Capital where we had a date with Mr Lincoln.

A trip down memory lane

Fourteen years ago Mr Johnson and I were newly married and college students. I had a semester of school left and he had two when we tied the knot in July of 1997. Shortly after, we moved into an austere two bedroom apartment with all our worldly goods. We lived in married student housing on the campus of the University of Illinois, a community mainly inhabited by older international students with families, and married grad and doctoral students.

The bank of mailboxes on the landing of our building listed names we then could not (but now can) pronounce : Xu, Zhang, something African, Wang, Lu. And smack in the middle, JOHNSON. We seemed to stand out. There was some major foreshadowing going on, but we of course had no idea.

We lived humbly on peanut butter (but splurged on good bread), and would spend our time at class, at work, and occasionally, when the moon and stars aligned, at home together on our cute little plaid love seat (reappolstered by Mr Johnson's grandma) in our IKEA meets garage sale living room where we would watch a laser discs (it was the 90s people!) in surround sound complicated by the cinder block walls and eat Chinese take out.

(Little did we know that our life -- a little less than a decade later -- would include three wonderful little people, and an even bigger adventure that involved again: Asian neighbors, Chinese take out, and more concrete living room walls!)

This last weekend we drove down to Champaign and our old university/early marriage stomping grounds with our girlies ... taking our obligatory October photograph on the campus quad. The girls posed under the Alma Mater statue outside Altguild Hall. Later we snapped some more of the girlies on a cobblestone street in the historic area of Urbana.

We parked on John Street, just around the corner from That's Rentertainment (which is stil on 6th) where we rented laser discs in the pre-ipod era. We bought the girlies U of I t-shirts @ TIS book store. (Go Illini!) And ate at a great Korean joint reminiscent of a lotteria in Seoul.

We drove to the barracks style housing that makes up the married student quarters, which still looks very much like it did in the 90s. We posed on the front steps of our old building, watched as Chinese students headed back from the impressive garden plot that they work all summer, and now are harvesting di guo (sweet potatoes) and squash.

It was raining and a little bleak ... The girls were running the camera ... and somehow we didn't get a shot of the whole building, but I think you get the idea ... laundry flapping on the balcanies. Storage boxes piled up on them too. We peeked into an empty first floor and saw no updates. Still austere. Exactly the same as it was when we spent two semesters living on love in 202.