Friday | January 18
Whether you work downtown on Fridays or need to warm up after doing ten complete sun salutations at the Point and receiving a free long-sleeve T-shirt, you should participate in Winter Bike to Work Day. Take the new bike lane on Dearborn Street to the Daley Plaza for complementary fleece balaclavas, hot beverages courtesy of Caribou, and Eli’s cheesecake. Enter a raffle and you could win your very own case of Clif Bars, possibly the worst thing ever to be given away for free. 50 West Washington Street. 6:30–9 a.m., free.
The opportunity to sleep over at Ryerson is within your grasp, but only if you can hack it. Join college-aged programmers from all over Illinois in the University of Chicago’s (un)Hackathon—a competition of libraries, servers, and software (but no web apps, please). Attendees vote for their top three favorite teams of four based on a five-minute presentation at the event’s culmination. The top team will win a Replicator 2 3D Printer from Makerbot, possibly the best thing ever to be given away for free; second and third place will earn themselves Inventables gift cards. Food and drink will be provided by IT Services to make sure you never crash. 1100 East 58th Street. Friday 5:30 p.m.–Saturday 8:30 p.m., free
Saturday | January 19
Learn all about Giacomo Puccini, the late-19th Century operatic composer, most famously of La bohème, Tosca, and Madame Butterfly, at Puccini e Lucca a Chicago: Symposium. Discussions of his work by bona fide opera scholars will be followed by a performance of selections from La bohème. The concurrent exhibit, which examines Puccini’s life-long connection to his Tuscan hometown of Lucca, opened on Tuesday and will run through February 16 at the Logan Center. 915 East 60th Street, Performance Hall 074. 2–5 p.m., free.
Sunday | January 20
There will be no more late-night flamenco dancing, live jazz, and three-dollar sangria Wednesdays—at least as far as People Tapas Lounge is concerned. The Wicker Park Spanish hangout, beloved by hipsters with Foursquare accounts and a handful of regulars, celebrates its closing night with DJs and drink specials. Even if you’ve never been to the lounge during their seven years in business, it’s not quite too late to indulge in their bacon-wrapped dates and chorizo-doused mussels. 1560 North Milwaukee Avenue. 5 p.m.–2 a.m., average tapas $11.
Monday | January 21
Don’t forget not to go to class today. Instead, you can actualize all of the dreams you once had for yourself, but gave up on due to scheduling issues. For example, you can watch the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy (plus The Hobbit, online) without leaving your bed, or do your laundry in your underwear. Conversely, you can spend part of the holiday at the Chicago History Museum, which is holding various events in the morning and afternoon in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. and the inspiring work he did. Catch the Writers’ Theatre’s performance of The MLK Project: Fight for Civil Rights at noon, and attend a reenactment of King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech at 3 p.m. Honestly, I don’t care what you do, but, please, be decent and don’t do it in the library. 1601 North Clark Street. 10 a.m.–3:30 p.m., free.
