From the City to the Burbs

“The next stop will be Grand” goes the train as the doors close. There are twenty or more people in the train car with me, all indulged in their own conversations, but all with some place to go. Loud sirens, large buildings, fast walking, tons of tourist, and the smell of the water from the beach make Chicago. The city that I’d grown up in and all I’d known about until my family decides to move to the suburbs. Country Club Hills, a quiet suburb of Chicago, not some place I wanted to move was our destination. I would have to leave my school, all my friends, and adapt to a new neighborhood and make new friends. I hated the idea of moving and cried so hard when we actually moved into our new house. My views about the suburbs soon changed once I got there, but at first I thought badly of them. The suburbs were distant from the city, full of upper class and arrogant people, and very boring with nothing to do.

The distance from Chicago to Country Club Hills was the initial reason I did not want to move. The ride to our new house seemed to take forever. How would I visit my friends? There was no bus service out there, and it seemed to have very few people that actually lived out there. It was like a living in a completely different world. I did not want go to outside and make new friends like my parents persuaded me to do. I went in with such a bad attitude about the place until I found an old friend that lived around the corner from me. We soon became best friends, and did everything together! She showed me how to get back to the city, and I soon realized how close we were to the city and how quickly we could get out there. I soon began to like living out there. I began to make more friends and was still able to commute back to Chicago to see my old friends.

As a young girl in the city, I had developed a negative attitude about the people who lived in the suburbs. I was sure that it was full of upper class arrogant people. There were many occasions where my family had gone shopping to the mall out there and the people always seemed to give us weird looks, like they could tell we were not from the same place. The teens always seemed to look down on other teens from the city. How quickly this view of the suburbs for me would change. As I began to make more friends, I soon found that most of the people living out there were from the city and even the neighborhood I was from. They also dreaded moving and had the same views as I. I then began to feel a closer bond with my new friends. We now had something in common and could talk about it. A lot of their parents also had jobs like my parents. There were a few whose families were loaded, but for the most part, everyone had average jobs.

The last problem I worried about was that the suburbs were very boring with nothing to do. This at times could be true. A lot of the stores and restaurant’s would close early, where as in the city, they would be open late. If you were not able to drive then you could be bored at times, but luckily for me, I had friends who could drive and we went everywhere. I would always have a ball when I went out. I found that the suburbs were not as bad as people made it seem. I went in with a very negative attitude and have found that I love living out there. It was a nice neighborhood, children could go out and play without parents worrying about gang activity, the school systems were nice and over all it was a nice community. There was so much to offer and I never realized that until we moved there. Pretty soon we rarely starting going back to the city. Everything we needed was out here.

In summation, my views towards the suburbs really changed once I moved out there. It was not as far from Chicago as I once thought it was, it only took about fifteen minutes to go back and forth, everyone out there was not upper class and arrogant but average and down to earth, and although sometimes it could be boring, there were a lot of things to do and rarely a dull moment. This just goes to show that I need to start going into situations with a more open mind. Although I did not want to move, I am glad my parents made the decision to. I got to expand my horizons beyond city limits and enjoy my life out in the suburbs.