The City of Detroit
Even though I have been living in East Lansing for 1.5 years, I’ve never been to Detroit, a city that was just 100 miles away. I had no reason to. All my friends are either here in East Lansing, in Pittsburgh, or .. in Indonesia. Many MSU students are actually from Detroit or one of the surrounding area, so I have heard a lot of stories about detroit, detroit this, detroit that.
One of the first thing people say when I tell them that I’m going to detroit is actually.. be careful. It’s a very dangerous city, there’s lots of crime. According to this site, detroit is ranked second to last (for crime) and third to last (for murders). So you see we (Nana and I) were quite apprehensive.
Our primary purpose was to actually exchange foreign currency. East Lansing had one site, but the exchange rate was too low. So we decided to go to Detroit, and instead of just going there to exchange rate, we decided to make a day of it and visit downtown Detroit to see what a real american city is like.. not like the small american village known as East Lansing.
We took off early from home, printing out all kinds of maps from google. We first went to Birmingham where the foreign currency exchange was. Birmingham, was a business district, and thus was very clean, and very elegant. People walked around
in expensive looking trench coats and ate in expensive (translation: we can’t afford it) looking restaurants. The buildings were neatly built (they weren’t all over the place), it seemed like it was planned. There were no real tower buildings, so it had the cozy feeling of a small town center area instead of a big metropolitan.
After basking in the scene, we went to the next stop on our itinerary, Belle Isle park. Detroit is near the US-Canada border, so you can actually see Windsor, Canada from some places of Detroit.
The Belle Isle park allows you to see both downtown Detroit and Canada (as well as the bridge that connects them) at the same time. It was thrilling to be able to see canada, as well as watching the beautiful view of downtown Detroit. Windsor Canada wasn’t as stunning as Detroit, but it’s still Canada right?
Our last stop was the Campus Martius park in downtown detroit. This was billed as Detroit’s gathering place. There was an ice rink, a christmas tree, hard rock cafe, as well as a strange looking structure. This place really seemed to be the heart of Detroit, where people gather. It was pretty cool.
Of course, our trip wasn’t trouble free. Twice we almost took wrong turns and ended up to the gates to the US - Canada Border. The first time I had to stop (and worry a bit), then finally made a U-turn to get out. The second time, I nearly turned at the ambassador bridge, if I had turned on the ambassador bridge, I would have to queue with a lot of really big trucks. While searching for the ambassador bridge, which a friend told us was really a beautiful scenery (he was wrong, it was full of big ugly trucks), we got lost. We ended up in a creepy dilapidated neighborhood behind various detroit’s factories… so I locked the door and looked at my map and off we went.
