Brian Cable

The falls itself is beautiful. It’s worth checking out for that. (I was on the Canadian side). However, the area immediately surrounding the place is just a total tourist trap crapfest. You’ve got blocks of novelty restaurants, souvenir shops, wax museums, mini-putt, ripley’s believe it or not type crap, and it’s really crowded and inauthentic and not much fun at all. Felt a lot like I do when I’m in a theme park, actually. I enjoyed our previous night in Windsor so much more so than Niagra Falls for that very reason.

Niagra Falls is awesome, but afterwards, do yourself a favor and stay somewhere else in Canada.

Actually once you get up there, it’s a little underwhelming. I don’t know what I was expecting, but somehow I expected more. Sure, you get a great view of the city/Lake Michigan, but after you look around for five minutes and taken a few pictures you’re pretty much done with the place, but you feel like you should still stick around because it cost you twenty minutes of walking to get there and back plus waiting in line for fifteen minutes plus fifteen bucks, so you keep looking around, or read the “Chicago History” walls on the inside area, or check out the cute girls that happen to be up there, and look at your watch a bunch, and then decide another fifteen minutes later you’ve finally wasted enough time to justify the time and money spent on the place and go.

Regardless, though, if you’re in Chicago, it’s still kinda worth it just to see it. You’ll be disappointed, yet still glad you did it.

Sucks you only have the two extremes here. It’s not anywhere special, just a lot of people end up coming here because of State Farm or ISU. There’s not really a whole lot to do here besides drink or the concerts or speakers that come to ISU/Wesleyan a few times a year, if they happen to be what you’re into (Tenacious D, Marilyn Manson, James Earl Jones, Kevin Smith, Noam Chomsky were my personal highlights). ISU’s not a terrible place to go to school, but it’s not particularly great either.

It’s a fairly isolated community, and many people easily live their whole lives here (go to college here cuz it’s cheap, and then go to State Farm because it’s a decent, if corporate job, and then have kids here because it’s a fairly safe community). It almost becomes a trap, and I only barely managed to escape it after 24 years of living there, and it’s only been a year and already it’s seductively calling me back, because that’s where my friends are, most of them having also left for various reasons but coming back themselves after tasting the rest of the world.