Our Tale of Two Cities--Part II

Sunday, July 24, 2005: Behold, St. Louis!

The next morning, we found the breakfast spread at the Drury Inn to be pretty phenomenal. They had dishes of golden, fluffy scrambled eggs, rolls, muffins, biscuits with gravy, bagels, cereal with milk, fruit and even a griddle where one would prepare their own waffles with syrup. There were coffee and soda machines outside in the dining area.

Our Knees Rammed Up Our Coccyx

Alas, our first experience of it had to be on a Sunday morning, when, of course, everyone and their dog was downstairs, lined up all the way back upstairs. We were crammed together hopelessly for probably 15-20 minutes. So it was a chore to get any food, which we then had to take back to our room upstairs on the fifth floor (via the stairs, due to those slow-ass elevators) because there were no tables available. But we were determined to get that meal; after all, part of what decided us on the more expensive Drury Inn (as compared to our more typical run-down shack), was that we could save money on the midday meal by eating the free breakfast. Fortunately for us, the subsequent weekdays we spent in St. Louis would prove to be much easier to navigate the breakfast buffet.

Once we had breakfast, we began efforts for finding our first tourist goal: the St. Louis Art Museum.

The Dying Cat Driver

Jennifer and I have navigated public transportation systems before. In Washington D.C. (1999), we learned how to use the Metro. In Chicago (2003), it was the Metra. When I went to Atlanta on business (2003), I used the Marta. Now in St. Louis, we had to figure out how to utilize the Metralink. It wasn’t too hard, but when the train arrived, we only just barely figured out that we needed to be on it. Once in a seat, it took several more minutes to determine the stops and when we would need to step off. The driver wasn’t very helpful, because the train was loud and she talked on the intercom in an indecipherable manner much like I would imagine a cat would sound if someone were plunging it to death with one of those familiar rubber-cupped bathroom implements. [DISCLAIMER: No cats were harmed to test the veracity of the previously mentioned metaphor!]

Mr. Happy Crack

While on the Metralink train, I spotted a sign in our car, advertising a concrete company that apparently fixes broken or deteriorated walls and sidewalks. They were called “Mr. Happy Crack,” and their slogan read, “Because a dry crack is a happy crack.” For obvious (and immature) reasons, Jennifer and I just found that hilarious. We made numerous references to it throughout the rest of our trip and just knew it would be an eye catcher for this essay. We were right, weren't we? :)

Dropped-Kicked Into Hell

When we reached our stop, we stepped out into a hellish landscape. It was pretty dilapidated, to the point that I asked Jennifer why we always seemed to end up in the most slummish parts of every city we visit. Her response was that such places are probably just where public transportation tends to deposit.

To beat all, it was hotter than the hinges of hell, probably topping out at around 98 degrees with ungodly humidity. We were immediately soaked with sweat and there were no signs or arrows in sight to direct us toward the art museum. Bereft of options, we navigated around some road construction and moved toward the Missouri History Museum, which bulked hazily in the distance. Our logic was that we could go inside and ask directions there.

It worked, we did indeed learn which direction to go, but the information desk warned us that it would be a 25 minute walk through the bog of atmosphere we’d already sweated through. But there was hope! Yes, the history museum staff promised us that if we went out to the bus stop, either of their bus lines would take us up to the art museum with no problems. So out we plodded, sweating more prolifically if we even blinked too hard, and waited at the bus stop. Immediately, a bus came along, and opened a door to let out a beautiful gout of succulent air conditioning…then the driver told us he couldn’t take us to the art museum because his bus line did not cover it. We’d have to wait for the other bus. Naturally. At that point, we figured we’d be just as likely to melt into bubbling goo waiting as walking, so we decided to just hoof it.

Sweaty Sophisticates

Since we were going to a museum, we thought we’d best dress up at least a little and look somewhat sophisticated. Boy, was that a stupid idea! Only a few feet into the second leg of our walk, both of us were drenched with sweat. I could feel it running down my back, like a warm pitcher of dishwater, leaving my button-up shirt sweaty and disgusting. It didn’t help that I was wearing black pants, which were drawing that harsh sunlight down on me like the mallet of God. We swam through the atmosphere for the full 25 minutes we’d been promised, winding around a gut-like road, mostly uphill, of course, until we finally came to the awe-inspiring museum. Then we discovered that we could have cut through a chunk of the park and probably saved ourselves 15 minutes of it! [GRRR!] Nonetheless, we’d finally arrived.

The first thing I did was find the restroom, where I went into a stall, took off my shirt and used some tissue to soak up some of the runnels of sweat. Ew! Still, that’s one of the benefits of being a man, I guess. Much easier to be topless in public, even if I was hidden the entire time.

Me at the Knee of Emperor Li

All the weather stuff aside, the museum itself was wonderful. Neither Jennifer nor I really liked the contemporary art much, since it seemed like a bunch of crap stuck together and called “sublime.” There were broken glass and sheet-metal exhibits, abstracts made out of the dirt of Harlem, skewed figures painted on burlap bags and so on.

Jennifer stands whelmed by this example of contemporary art.

However, once we got into some of the more classic stuff, things got pretty interesting. We found a whole section of Indian art, where we saw the incarnations of Shiva and heads of Buddha. I just had to get a shot of me in front of a Chinese statue, which weighed literally two thousand pounds.

Thomas meditates in front of this 16th century Daoist deity from the Chinese Ming Dynasty.

There were, of course, lots of paintings. Jennifer and I both found ourselves much more drawn to the European work than the American. We found something more enchanting about dukes, duchesses, kings, princes and popes that just wasn’t captured by farmers and cowboys. Jennifer enjoyed the realism of the Impressionist paintings, but disdained the vague outlines that emphasized the essences of the figures depicted, rather than the details. Having recently heard about the restoration of the Georges-Pierre Seurat painting Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, she had developed an interest in the pointillism painting style; it also has some shared characteristics with the inks used in print journalism, something close to her heart. We did find a painting or two by Seurat, but his aforementioned masterwork would have to wait until later in our trip. There were a few by van Gogh, though neither of us are really fans of his post-Impressionist jaggedness that comes of his loose brushwork.

We left the St. Louis Art Museum quite content that we had accomplished the first of our prearranged goals. But we found we weren't quite done yet. Outside, the museum was surrounded by some cool art forms, like a gigantic metallic tree. Jennifer couldn't help herself, she engaged in her new hobby, yoga! Yes, appropriately, she affected the Tree Pose (see below):


The Newest Member on the List of People I’d Be Content To Hear About Getting the Sh*t Beat Out of Them

We left the museum ground and headed back for the hotel. When we arrived at the Metralink station, sweaty and irritable, we had to use one of the stamp machines to get our train tickets validated. A few of the guards were standing around, talking about nothing and basically ignoring all of us passersby. I had no problems with the machine I used, but Jennifer had some trouble with hers. One of the helpful guards just shouted out, “It don’t work.” Then he went back to talking to his other jar head friends. That’s the kind of job that I want, where I just stand around doing nothing but trading monosyllabic grunts, and maybe occasionally pointing out the obvious to someone without troubling myself to actually outline some helpful alternatives for them. What a lout. What a thug.

The horses' anatomies in this picture we'd later capture illustrate the personality of the idiot the Thornberries met at the Metralink.

Jennifer and I both just found him rude and abrupt. A true civil servant would have pointed out the other machine, rather than just telling her that what she was doing wasn’t working. Fortunately, there were two of us, so we didn’t need any input from genius and his other brachiating buddies.

The Awkward Employees

At the end of a busy, eventful and stimulating day, we wanted to get some dinner and just enjoy it in the room. We moseyed over to Union Station, the huge mall made out of an old train station, and investigated their food court. After some intense scrutiny and a long gander at the menus, we decided on what we wanted from a Mexican place that turned out to be the only one in sight that was closing down. The Thornberry luck strikes again. On Sunday evenings, even the malls close early. We were in luck that the two somewhat bumbling guys working the booth were willing to go ahead and let us squeak through before they slammed down their oven doors for the last time. Of course, the one thing I wanted was the one thing they no longer served, necessitating a last minute change in my hard-wrought logic of choice.

It was otherwise funny, because the cook kept making some dumb mistakes. For example, he nodded when I told him “no sour cream” and then flopped a dollop onto my Taco Salad anyway. He prepared part of Jennifer’s order, stuck it into the microwave to melt the cheese, apparently forgot about it and fixed it all over again before he opened the microwave to find his first batch. Then he handed that batch to the packing guy, who couldn’t get it to stay closed because the microwave had warped the polystyrene clam-shell lid. I felt like we were watching Laurel and Hardy trying to fix food.

Other than that tasty dinner and some late night television, the rest of Sunday was pretty uneventful.

Click for Part III