More a tip than anything else: If you download the city map on Google Maps in a place where you have internet, it will show you where you are (via the blue dot) when you pull it up if you are lost in a city/not sure which direction to go. It’s saved me from getting too lost so many times!

To preface, I’m an American from Chicago...

“All to take pictures and eat food someplace where everything is strange and you don’t know the rules and etiquette?”

Combining last week's theme with this week's: I peed in the bushes next to the Eiffel Tower in Paris this last June. It was at night, my friend and I went to see it sparkle, had too much wine, & nowhere else to go...straight up snuck into some bushes. I still feel like I desecrated holy romantic ground and that I'll…

I was confused by this too. I definitely remember giving my teachers full out hugs as a student because I loved school and was close to them.

I actually did read it as...looking like a woman. Not as looking "conventionally attractive". Hopefully she meant it in that way.

I took a workshop with her at Second City. She was wonderful and encouraging and hilarious.

Sure, but you're assuming everyone has the proper gear (willing to bet some international students, of which there are many, do not). And actually... I'm lucky enough to have a job (full-time, salaried, up in Chicago) which did understand this (many people walk either from their apartments or from where the CTA drops…

Except it takes a lot longer to walk to class on a campus the size of UIUC. I'd regularly trek 20-30 mins. to get to a class, and that was without the wind blowing me over.

So, it's a little frustrating because there are two different situations going on here, when people are trying to group them together.

STOP. AGH. WHY DID I CLICK? WHYYYY?

Wrong. In India, the threat of a family disowning a girl, simply because she's a girl, is a very real thing. Boys are looked at much more favorably in that culture. And yes, I'm a woman from an Indian family.

YES I agree! I'm in Chicago and have had some great dates and am also dating an amazing guy I met on there. That isn't to say I haven't had my fair share of creep-o messages but whatever...there are also just as many creep-o guys at bars, so I don't see the difference.

I got a guy telling me he "liked the contrast between my brown skin and his white skin" once followed by a Pablo Neruda poem, as well as a few "hay sexi" or "up for sumthin' casual?" messages...but nothing too vulgar. I just ignore them and they don't attempt to contact me again.