Welcome back everyone to the good ole UIUC, oops … Illinois.

Last night I went out for my friend’s 21st birthday to the bars in Wrigleyville in Chicago. As we wandered from bar to bar, paying exorbitant prices for shots that wouldn’t get a Mormon drunk, I thought about how I was excited to go back to the bars at school.

Only there can you drink cheap beer, hang out with your best friends and do something incredibly embarrassing without having anyone bat an eye, because chances are, there’s a drunken idiot next to you who is doing something far worse. Most bars here aren’t really unique, but as U of I bars, they hold their own special appeal.

I believe our bars have played a big role in shaping what so far have been the best four years of my life. Recently I read a lot of critiques online about the dive bars (Kams, C.O. Daniel’s and The Clybourne among the top, for you freshmen who don’t know yet), and they were absolutely horrid. People writing reviews on the online review site, yelp.com, understandably gave these bars awful marks – the majority of them received a paltry one star out of five. The words dingy, sleazy and “underage skanks” were used quite frequently, and there were many complaints of overwhelming smells of vomit present the next day on the walk down Daniel Street to the Quad. While I do agree that these bars lose some of their appeal after freshman year, they do have a special place in my heart, and I know they have a special place in the hearts of the yelp.com reviewers, if they could stoop to admit it. Bars like these are perfect examples of the quintessential college bar that accepts it may not be the classiest on the block, but guarantees a good time, especially when you are new to the scene. They aren’t pretentious. They don’t claim to cater to a more sophisticated crowd, unlike certain bars around Green Street that had required revelers to be 21 and “appropriately dressed” for a time.

They are gritty and proud of it! They are bars that every University student should go to because they represent all of the unwholesome fun you get to have while you are still young.

I say, embrace these shenanigans and mischief, because at the risk of sounding cliché, these are the times that you will remember years later. You’ll look back and think, ‘Oh man, I can’t believe we hung out there so often, we must have been smoking a heck of a lot crack all those times that we kept going back for more.’ (This said, of course, with a glass of brandy in one hand and a worn copy of Great Expectations nestled next to you).

Perhaps I’m just getting sentimental, but I really think these bars need to be appreciated for what they are.

That said; I’ll only go to these bars maybe once a semester. After all, there is only so much Kams time you can stomach after freshman year.