Saori and I are on our way to St. Louis Missouri to attend an open house event. This is a pretty much chapperoned trip which will be pretty new for both of us. Once we arrive at the airport, we will be whisked away and shuttled, lectured, wined, dined, and toured. My hope is that it will be more illustrative of the school, and less marketing event.
We dropped Suki off at mom's house yesterday, cleaned up the apartment and packed last night, and this morning walked to light rail to take us to the airport. Door to Airport was about 50 minutes. The light rail takes about 25 minutes from the Encanto to Sky Harbor, but then there's waiting on both sides of that for the train to arrive and for the bus to leave and travel. So everything's pretty much moving on schedule.
Sky Harbor was more of a mess than usual- lots of people with small dogs, which is odd since I almost never see dogs at Sky Harbor. Made me wonder if there's some big weekend event that's attracting people to town. Or could just be the flow of snowbirds. I've just got a small duffle and my Freitag bag, and my duffel is feeling really empty. Room for cool souveniers I guess.
The flight is totaly full. There's just something dingy about domestic flights, like a public restroom. The plane was a little late, and the crew make no attempt to cover thier desire that they would much rather be anywhere else doing anything other than yelling at passengers to turn thier carry on luggage to fit more bags in the overhead bins. The captain welcomed us all on board once we reached cruising altitude, and welcomed us to move around the cabin. However, he added that we should all stay in our seats and keep our seat belts fastened. We're basically welcome to move around the cabin, provided we move directly the restrooms and directly back to our seats in the fastest possible way. We were futher welcomed to spend more money on depressing sandwiches and sacks of snacks, but we declined.
Flying into St. Louis, looking at the sprawl of the suburbs, my first thought was "Phoenix with trees."
We were met at the airport by members of the graduate architecture council, and they piled us all into rental vans. We were met by Jonathan and Sam. Jonathan was wearing a Skagen watch identical to mine. We piled into a rental SUV with three other students and two graduate architecture volunteers. The driver, Bloom, was a huge friendly guy who talked us through the areas of the city we were passing through. In the rented SUV's we went through the usual routine- where are you from? where did you graduate? what program would you be entering?
The graduate student voluneteers were all part of a student council of the archiecture graduates- the GAC. While Kathleen O'Donnel did most of the coordination for the event for the university, the students did all the legwork, which really made a strong impression on me. Here were architecture graduate students, some of them thesis candidates four weeks away from thier presentations, taking many hours of thier thursday, friday, and saturday to chaperone, give guided tours, chat, and drive potential students around.
Bloom dropped us off at the hotel, the Clayton buisness district Sheraton, where there was a table staffed by more students, all GAC members/volunteers, who gave us folders with information about the school, maps, and an itenerary of the next day and a half. Bloom had been talking up a woman blues singer downtown and said that, whether we choose WashU or not, for the Love of God, we had to go hear this woman sing. Saori and I liked the sound of that, so we decided to be around whenever Bloom and co was leaving, which was an indefinate time between nine and midnight. Saori asked about right hand on red turns, and whether they were legal here. Bloom told us they were totally legal. In addition, he told us that car passengers can drink, and that you can drink in public as long as the container isn't glass.
Our hotel room as nice, standard, two queen beds, nice glass shower. We dropped our luggage and went back down to take a walk. We left the hotel and walked around outside around in the late afternoon. Where we were at in Clayton was kind of odd- the hotel was in a very vertical and dense financial district with lots of towers, and then it transitioned immediately into upscale restraunts and bars, and then abruptly to woody neighborhoods. It was pretty deserted, actually, being after business hours. We strolled through neighborhoods that reminded me of nice towns in Oklahoma, or parts of Salt Lake City, and the squirrels scampered everywhere.
We were actually hunting for a convenience or grocery store to buy a gallon of water, as we've found its the best way to refill our bottles of water we take on the road. We finally came across a gourmet grocery store that reminded me strongly of AJ's ( fitting for the upscale neighborhood, I guess) and we wandered back to the hotel. We met up with some of the other students, Weng and Cord(elia) and walked to a tapas bar that had been recomended, BARcelona. Thier white sangria was pretty pathetic, but the tapas were pretty good, especially the grilled spanish sausages that reminded us of the choripan of Buenos Aires. We actually got two plates, they were so good.
After dinner, we waked back to the hotel and hung around the lobby, chatting and looking at the other architecture students, who are all immediately recognizable to each other. Most of them looked younger than we were. Around 11, Bloom returned from dinner with some other open house visitiors and whipped out his cell phone, trying to figure out rides for the small group of people who wanted to go hear his singer. It was going to be tight. He had asked but been expressly forbidden to touch the keys of the rented SUVs used to shuttle students around, and had to squeeze us into two cars. Saori and I and three others crammed ourselves into Bloom's Honda Element, we took off. On the road, he told us that his friend, the head of the GAC, had begged him to just get the visitors back to the hotel safely, and that his friend was going to have to write an apology letter. The school director was apparently less than thrilled to hear potential students were hitting a blues bar downtown for a late night before a busy day.
I forget the name of the bar. It was in a grungy district of downtown, about 300 yards from the river, next to a railway trestle bridge and a baseball stadium. Bloom generously paid the $7 cover charge for all of us, and we went in the bar. The blues band on the tiny stage by the door was fantastic- Kim Massie, a mountain of a woman, sat in a chair next to a tip jar, belting and crooning and barking the blues dominated the stage, which was bathed in red light. A lean stick of a man accompanied on sax along with a bass guitarist and a moon-faced gap-toothed painist pounding away in the corner. It was fantastic. What a voice! The small bar was packed to standing capacity, and we all stood behind the patrons sitting at the bar. Silvano, another open house visitor from Dallas, bought us a round of drinks, and I picked up a round later. The band took a break around 12:30 AM and we went outside to sit on the patio to give our legs and ears a break. We sat for awhile, talking and drinking, and finally piled back into Bloom's car around 1 AM. He took us on an impromtu tour of the St. Louis area, driving through residential neighborhoods, nightlife centers, by churches and museums pointing out a Tadao Ando crafted museum, and finally dropped us all off at the hotel again. We all staggered our way to bed around 2 AM. Our wake up call came precisely five hours later.
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