Boyfriend Visits 2: Art Prize, Football, and GastroPubs

So this post is a bit overdue, but my life as a student has been incredibly busy in the last week or so.
However, last weekend was one of the best weekends EVER, because last weekend was a....

BOYFRIEND VISIT!!

but even better, I got to see a lot of other friends too!

The adventure started when I got out of my last afternoon meeting an hour early. Which is great, because although it only takes 4 hours to drive back to the Mitten, the time difference results in gaining an extra hour.

This is what my drive looked like

driving and taking pictures at the same time is a little dangerous, but the colors were really pretty (even if the lighting in this pic isn't great). It took me slightly less than 4 hours to get to Grand Rapids...my excitement tends to translate to a lead foot.
The first thing I did was meet up with my long lost roomie, Liz!

and her new apartment downtown! We caught up over some homemade veggie pizza and "witches brew" :)

looks good, right? We're pretty legit chefs - a few years ago we even boiled lobsters. Sometimes the best way to catch up with friends is over amazing culinary creations.
After a our delicious dinner I headed over to Eric's house to catch up with more friends :) After getting tackled with hugs, we headed out to a dance hall to celebrate Pulaski Days. This involved catching up, meeting people, and dancing a lot of Polka.

Here we all are after a few semi-failed attempts at Polka-ing. Alas, at this point I could barely keep my eyes open after a full day of school, traveling, ect., so we we headed home.
The next morning, I got to have breakfast with these two!!

but we had normal clothes on this time. Coffee and delicious sticky buns none of which I got pictures of, but were nonetheless delicious. We swapped all sorts of teaching and grad student stories all morning, but it wasn't long before I had to be on my way to fit in some Art Prize.
Eric and I spent the next part of the day wandering around downtown Grand Rapids, checking out the art!

There were penguins!

and dinosaurs!

and weird peppers made out of deflated balloons. But when it started raining we jumped in the car to grab some lunch at the Green Well (this is my new favorite restaurant in Grand Rapids, it's amazing). We couldn't decide what we wanted, so we got pulled pork polenta and mac and cheese, and shared them.

Both were delicious.

Before long it was time for some GV football tailgating, and a great game.
The weekend flew by so fast, and as soon as I was back on the road I was back to missing my favorite city.
So here's hoping I can go back for another visit soon. In the meantime, it's back to my hectic grad school life.