Day 30: a glimpse of the outside world

Rest Day in Kansas City, MO — 0 mi, 0 ft

Today everyone in the world woke up at 8am excited to attend our learning festival in Kansas City. I’m not sure how the rest of the world handled their excitement in the morning, but I managed it by going back to bed for 20 minutes before leaving from the hotel, kindly provided to us by aSTEAM Village (the program hosting our learning festival), with the team at 8:45. Along the way we munched on some breakfast burritos from a nearby cafe that Aarushi picked up for us. 

The rest of the world must’ve been too overwhelmed by their excitement to make it to the learning festival because, after arriving and setting up, we had 15 students in attendance. We’re used to having somewhere around 60-80 students and, while we certainly always want to be able to teach as many kids as logistically possible, having fewer students also means we can work more directly one-on-one with the students. I also personally enjoy making our workshop more of a conversation which I feel works best with fewer students. 

To start off our learning festival, Tatiana led the students through an introduction circle and then a rock-paper-scissors (RPS) tournament. I don’t know what they put in Caroline’s burrito this morning, but she was feeling particularly merciless as she once again annihilated the playing field without an ounce of guilt towards the many RPS careers she was prematurely ending.

With Caroline’s RPS rage sedated, we continued with our regularly scheduled workshops. Drew and I teach a workshop where the students build a brushless electrical motor using an electromagnet, circuit board, magnets, and legos. Along the way, we talk about magnets, what makes materials magnetic, the Earth’s magnetic field, Lenz’s Law, and solenoids. It’s pretty cool stuff 😎

^{Students intently learning about electric motors, and their unconcealable disappointment when Nunu distracted them from the riveting lesson by taking a picture.}

The other workshops we ran at this LF were: Carmen and Aarushi’s chemistry workshop where students mix and run an iodine clock chemical reaction; Nunu and Caroline’s design and architecture workshop where students work on 2D to 3D designing and visualizing; and Tatiana’s circuit workshop where student’s build a circuit that senses motion to turn on a light. A big shoutout to Amelia Alinkil for her help in developing the ideas for our circuits workshop! Amelia is one of the founding members of Yuva Impact and we are very grateful for the non-profit’s support of our mission.

The lessons went by very smoothly by our standards and just like that the festival was over. During the LF, we got to take a peak at one of the student’s Iron Man helmet that they were building, complete with lights, a speaker, and a lithium battery of questionable safety with two open wires dangling out. 

After the workshop, we had agreed to do a “mini-LF” for a student that wasn’t able to make it for the original LF that we were told was very talented and interested in the LF. We spent an hour running through Aarushi + Carmen’s chemistry workshop and then Drew and I ran through our workshop. 

The student’s parents kindly offered to take the team out to dinner at a sushi place after wrapping up the mini-LF. Unfortunately, the team also had accumulated 3 days worth of dirty clothes from the ride into KC + rest day + learning festival – things were getting dire to say the least. Since we already needed to head to a laundromat to do laundry, we decided we should also finally wash the stinky sleeping bags and tents while we were there. 

Nunu and I volunteered to do the laundry (sending one person alone to do laundry while everyone else ate sushi felt a little cruel), so we quickly drove back to the hotel to grab our laundry and then drove to drop off the 5 others at the restaurant for dinner at 5:30. While dropping them off, we noticed a lot of soccer fans for team Mexico walking around – this will be relevant later.

Nunu and I then drove off to begin our laundry adventure at a nearby laundromat. We got straight to business claiming three washing machines: one for our clothes and two for the sleeping bags and tents. 

After waiting for ~30 minutes (and paying $8.50 per machine ouch) we began moving everything over to the dryers. As we were taking the tents out though, water flooded out of the tents into the walkway creating a huge river of water from the washers to the dryers. Our commotion must’ve got the attention of the laundromat owner because she came over and immediately told us that we wouldn’t be able to dry our tents with any heat because they would melt inside the dryers and that we couldn’t put them into the dryer soaking wet because that would ruin the dryer. 

We decided to take the tents outside to dry on some handrails, per the laundromat owner’s suggestion. We pretty quickly realized this wasn’t gonna be very helpful since it would take forever to dry, and we also didn’t want to leave the tents hanging outside because we wanted to go grab dinner ourselves while the dryers ran. So we decided to shake out the water from the tents so they weren’t dripping wet, and then take them in to run in the dryer on “No Heat”. 

With our laundry maybe becoming dry, we decided to reward ourselves for our maybe hard work by going to grab dinner in the same area we dropped the rest of the team off for dinner since we wanted to see if we could catch some “World Cup Vibes”. Kansas City is the only city along our route hosting games for the World Cup so this was our way of trying to remind ourselves about what the outside world was like. 

When we got to the area, called the Kansas City Power and Light District, we found a lot of eager (mostly team Mexico) fans ready to watch the Mexico vs Ecuador round of 32 game starting in ~1 hour. Unfortunately, we also found a huge line of said fans waiting to get into the watch party area. 

^{If you look closely at the picture on the right to the right of the brick building, you can see the rest of the team standing above the line contemplating getting in line. We only realized my picture included them after this blog was already posted.}

With our laundry only running for an hour, we decided to forgo watching the game to just grab food and head back for the laundry. We spotted Joe’s BBQ, a well-known BBQ place in KC, and decided to eat there since who knows when you’ll next get to enjoy some great BBQ between now and California. 

We headed inside to a nearly entirely empty restaurant, and were initially seated in some back corner. While walking in though, I noticed that there were some large windows that looked out to the crowd of fans at the watch party, and asked if we could be moved there so we could at least visually partake in the “World Cup Vibe”.

As we were moving to a table by the windows, we realized the window was actually a window to an outdoor patio… right next to the huge crowd of fans waiting for the game to start. We immediately asked to be moved again and ended up seated outside in the super nice patio, with only a tiny fence separating us from the huge crowd of fans. We later realized that the fence had a gap in it where one could walk straight into the crowd. This was a little concerning since one could get into the crowd without going through any of the metal detectors/security that the rest of the crowd had to go through, but ignoring that this was super lucky for us.

We spent the next hour-ish eating the best BBQ we’ve had on this trip, and maybe my favorite meal of the trip so far, while an MC on stage hyped up the already incredibly hyped crowd. 

I would think that, in theory, Kansas City and the group running the watch party should be an impartial 3rd party to the Mexico-Ecuador game, however, that was very much not the case. The MCs and the entire watch party crowd was incredibly skewed towards Mexico. The MCs spent a good 75% of the pre-match time leading the crowd through “Viva Mexico”, “Mexico! Mexico! …”, and “¿Quien Gana? ¡Mexico!” (“Who’s going to win? Mexico”) chants. At some point, the MCs even brought up a fan from the crowd with a HUGE Mexico flag and had him wave it in front of the crowd. TBH, I feel bad for any Ecuador fans in the crowd. 

Besides that, they also had a live band and a DJ playing music that the crowd really enjoyed dancing to. We also got to see several cool outfits including various Aztec-related costumes and someone dressed as El Chapulin Colorado¹. 

The most fun part was looking out and seeing people being literally thrown up into the air every couple of seconds across the crowd, which is apparently very common in Mexican soccer culture. 

Speaking of the rest of the team, seeing how great the vibes were here, we decided we should tell the rest of the team to come check out the game after they finished dinner. When we checked their locations though, they were already back at the hotel! 

Turns out they had been in line to get in at the same time that Nunu and I walked into Joe’s, and even saw us walk into Joe’s. They ended up deciding the line was too long though and went home. 

Anyways, we had finished our food and spent a bit of time in the crowd, and decided we should actually head back to finish our laundry before we got a fine for our 1hr parking that had just expired. 

We got to the laundromat at 8:30, picked up the clothes, rolled up all 7 sleeping bags, and folded our 3 tents. Since our tents had been spinning on “No Heat” this whole time, they were, unsurprisingly, still damp. We decided to put them back to dry for a bit longer while we rolled up the sleeping bags. Without realizing though, we put them back to dry at “Medium Heat” (recall that the laundromat owner said that this would melt them IMMEDIATELY). By the time we realized this, it was too late… our tents had become… perfectly dry Yea I don’t know why we got fearmongered into not drying our tents with heat but whatever that’s life. 

We left the laundromat at 9:15 (and also took a peek at the score of the soccer game: 2-0 Mexico). 

When we got back to the hotel, we painfully realized that the car also needed to be packed before our early departure tomorrow at daybreak. Nunu and I used two luggage bags to chaotically bring our minivan’s worth of gear down from our rooms upstairs (only nearly tipping over the carts a few times) and packed everything into the car. By 10:10, the minivan was ready for tomorrow’s adventure. 

Afterwards, I spent some time cleaning and lubing my bike chain, as well as fixing (?) my front brake which had been acting up lately. 

After finishing up and getting ready for bed, I got under the covers at 11:00pm sharp. Perfect, a whole 5 hours of sleep before our 4am wakeup tomorrow! I then went to bed. I then got back up at 11:04pm to see who had won the Mexico vs. Ecuador game. Mexico 2-0, nice. 

– Nate