I took a couple weeks off for the holidays and traveled back east to see family, but now I’m back in action! 

Most of my Ann Arbor adventures last week weren’t the stuff of good blog posts: meetings at Observer HQ, grocery shopping at the Maple Rd. Kroger (it’s so much better than the one in my neighborhood), a trip to the Huron Village Barnes & Noble to spend a gift certificate (I picked up Sophie Gilbert’s Girl On Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves).

To remedy this, I took Doug out for date night at Miss Kim on Friday. He’d be the first to admit he’s not the most adventurous eater, and I suspected that Korean food was a bit of a concession on his part, but then he tried the cacio e pepe tteokbokki and his eyes lit up. The bulgogi bibimbop was so good that the table next to us asked us what we were eating so they could order it too. And our server hooked us up with carrot salad and smashed potatoes. I KNOW I KNOW, raving about a Zingerman’s restaurant is very nouveau Townie, but what can I say, good is good. 

 

That was going to be it, but yesterday morning while browsing Reddit over coffee, I spied a post about a rally by Ann Arbor Indivisible about ICE. The timing was perfect: we’re running a story about ICE action in Washtenaw in the upcoming issue, so I headed straight for Ann Arbor.

For the sake of editorial objectivity, I won’t talk about my opinions about the issue of ICE, but what I will say is that it was an exciting energy, the sight of these hundreds of people, all different ages, who left the coziness of home to go march and chant in the streets because of something they believe in. I’ve had the opportunity to observe a lot of the different scenes in Ann Arbor — arts, nonprofits, restaurants, business, government, education — but this was my first time seeing the progressive political side of the city, which makes up so much of its history and identity.

“How do you feel?” I asked an older gentleman as the crowd amassed outside City Hall. “This is a really exciting environment, right?”

“I wish there were more people,” he said thoughtfully. 

“I feel like there’s a couple hundred at least!” I blurted.

“There’s quite a few,” he allowed. “But I was hoping for thousands.”