The St. Louis Chronicles - Day 1

Somehow I got selected by my office to go to a conference in St. Louis this year.  How it happened, I couldn't say but I'm excited to be here.  We are here for almost a whole week, which is sort of unheard of for a conference but I'm not complaining. I've never been to St. Louis and have spent the better part of May pumping all my friends on Facebook and even directly e-mailing a few people for the best things to do in the city.  I think my colleague and I have come up with a pretty good list.  My colleague will also be my roommate and partner in crime this week so let's call her Joanna.  We arrived today, Sunday, and got settled in our hotel.  The conference is huge and our employer, in it's usual fashion, approved us about a week ago to go.  Fortunately, our boss had told us she was recommending us about three weeks ago so we had been working on hotels since early May.  But most people who go to the conference start planning, oh, 6-8 months in advance.  So our hotel pickin's were... slim, at best.  We're staying in a quiet Western suburb of St. Louis and so far, it's pretty nice here.

We landed at the airport after a smooth flight and were picked up by Mike, a St. Louis native, the shuttle driver for our hotel, who chatted with us on the ride.  A very friendly guy, he basically just confirmed with us all the things our research and friends had told us.  So we felt pretty good.  Joanna is a resourceful researcher and, like me, looking to make the most of her time in St. Louis on somebody else's dime.  So she had figured out that there was a Blues festival ending tonight in the downtown area.  We decided to get settled, take the train into downtown, get dinner in Laclede's Landing right by the Arch, and then head to the blues festival.  

All of that happened without any significant directional mishaps.  Our dinner at Morgan Street Brewery wasn't great.  I saw beer pretzels on the menu and compulsively ordered them because soft pretzels with mustard are one of my most favorite things on the planet.  But when they came they were basically just the Super Pretzels you will find in your neighborhood grocer's freezer case.  The mustard was pretty good.  Our waitress was a bit rude as well.  But our dinners with drinks and an appetizer, were less than $15. Unheard of. 

After that Joanna and I walked to the Arch, a few blocks away and it really is a beautiful structure.  It has a nice big surrounding park and this night it almost blended in perfectly with the sky.  Seeing the park, the Arch and the river in the daytime will be lovely.

Next we walked through the downtown area to the blues festival.  It's a Sunday night on a holiday weekend.  We did see some ladies at Laclede's dressed to kill (literally, their stilettos could kill someone easily) but other than that just seemed like a normal night.  But the downtown area was so quiet.  Eerily quiet.  We could cross major thoroughfares without a thought for oncoming traffic with no other people in sight.

My first impressions of the city are that its people are very kind, it's more relaxed, kinder, quieter, and more spread out than DC.  I look forward to learning more.