Michigan Central Depot

I went on a field trip today with one of my education classes. We stopped very briefly at a multi-cultural high school in Detroit, and then spent about an hour and a half at a total immersion bilingual elementary school. But then the real fun began - we went on a "tour" of Detroit to get a feel for poverty and what some of the kids we met today might see on their way to school. First stop: Michigan Central Depot, the old abandoned train station in Detroit. As you can see from the picture, it's very big, and very beautiful. What you might not be able to tell is just how run-down it is. Every single window was broken; there's a barbed-wire fence around the whole place; we walked around it a little bit and I felt like I was in Croatia or Iraq or some other bombed-out war zone. In a way, I guess I was. I also saw a dead raccoon. That was awesome.
My thoughts on today's events: had we been a class of phtographers, it would have been an amazing day - I saw so many things beautiful and interesting places that I wanted to take pictures of. The in-classroom experience, however, was minimal and I think my professor just did that part because she had to; you could tell that getting to Mexicantown was the most important thing to her... but more on that later.

Michigan Central Depot - B-