There was a brief meeting of sorts last night but events and schedules are still being finalized by the organizers.
Art Institute:
It's about a mile north of the hotel. I believe there's a bus that stops at the hotel that will take you to the Art Institute. I'll look it up for you.
For those of you that are not familiar with Chicago's annual New Years Jam allow me to to give you a run down of what goes on. NYJ is a small part of a larger (fucking huge!) indoor festival called Mayor Daley's Holiday Sports Festival. Footbag is one of the featured interactive sports and activities hosted within the enormous McCormick Place convention center. We are at the this site from 10 in the morning till 4 in the afternoon. As well as running freestyle and 2/4-square events we also have an obligation (from what I understand to be the conditions in which we get the site year after year) to interact with bystanders, mostly children, interested in participating in footbag. It can be as simple as having them kick a bag several times in order to get a free footbag or as involved as teaching hackers some basics of the other footbag disciplines and games. If you get bored of footbag, you are free to roam around and check out the other sports and activities throughout the festival.
When not at the event site, almost all the players are at the adjacent host hotel, the Hyatt McCormick. Even most of the local players stay at the hotel just out of convenience. The hotel offers a discounted rate for the days of the event as long as you mention that you're part of the Holiday Sports Festival. CIC generally gets a suite where we host the after parties and organize 2 of the group dinners and 1 group breakfast. Then, there's the ever popular late night shred room. It's a conference room that's rented (I think it was officially from 6 in the late afternoon to 12 at night) from the hotel that we use to continue playing, run more events and hang out some more.
A third group dinner is organized on the last night of the event. It's an outing to Chicago's Chinatown neighborhood, about 6 blocks west of the hotel. Other than that, players are indoors all the time since all the sites are connected by several long hallways. Someone mentioned it was like a mini Worlds and everyone is together almost all the time.
or I just made that up.
Regardless, you will be in the next NYJ thread posting what an amazing time you had, saying how much fun it was and adding a few weird-ass stories to your event experiences. You might even catch yourself speaking some CIC slang
) , wish I could offer sleep over too, but...you know...depends.
