Friday, April 26th – Sunday, April 28th 2019

Why? Because why not? On a whole, I’d say if there are other cities on your radar that you haven’t visited yet, maybe hold off on St. Louis. We had a pleasant weekend here, but there’s no reason to feel like you’re missing out if you never get a chance to make your way to this city. Seems pretty livable though, a comfy place to settle down. I mean, that’s usually how these quieter places tend to work out, right?

Unfortunately, a flight delay got us into the city much later than planned. The first thing we did after a late night dinner was walk on Delmar Loop, which should’ve been a popular street. But by then it was around midnight, so shops were closed and there wasn’t much going on. But at least our dinner was at a restaurant on this street, so we got to do some very limited people watching. One of the first things we noticed about St. Louis is that it’s way more diverse than we imagined. I mean, this street even had a bubble tea shop! Shows how sorely ignorant we are about this city.

But there was one, and only one, thing I knew about St. Louis… the Gateway Arch! It’s one of the top 10 most iconic monuments in America according to some random article that we sent to friends to convince them to come, which didn’t work btw. But of course we went to check this out, because if we went to St. Louis without seeing this, I don’t know what we went to the city for at all.

Did you know that this arch symbolized the city’s role as the “Gateway to the West”? ..eh, maybe you did. Well I did not! Neither did I know that you could go inside and up to the top of the arch (Victor did all the planning for this trip). From the top it’s a nice view to both the east and west, and I imagine what it might’ve felt like back then to be on the border of America and the vast unknown wild west. Not one of the most beautiful views up there, but unique just for its historic significance.

While the monument looks pretty classy from a distance, I was disappointed to find out this was a national park. Apparently this happened as of 2018. Like, why would they do that? This is not a place of natural beauty, not even close, and to me, this sullies the sanctity of the other, actual national parks.

I quickly learned that beyond the arch, St. Louis is all about their BBQ. In our brief weekend there, we had BBQ what- 3 times? We really indulged ourselves…

One of the other more unique things to do here is take a tour at Anheuser-Busch St. Louis brewery, the home of Budweiser. This particular branch  is special because Anheuser-Busch all began right here in St. Louis. If you love beer, you’ll love the tour here. Not so much a fan of beer? I’d say it’s still a pretty good deal.. unless you hate beer, I guess lol. There are even free shorter tours, but I paid $10 for the 75min “Day Fresh” tour, just to kill more time while boyfriend played poker. Besides the tour itself, they feed you with so much beer you get back much more than the $10 you pay, including a souvenir bottle of beer they brewed fresh that day- kinda neat. It’s worth booking your tickets in advance online because specific tours do sell out. In our case, we thought we arrived just in time for a tour, only to find it was sold out, and there’s not much else to do here while you’re waiting around for the next tour to start.

You got your brewery for the adults; now for the kids? St. Louis offers a zoo, a free zoo! Now I loved zoos as a kid, but as an all grown up big girl now, I usually don’t get as excited about the idea anymore. A giraffe is a giraffe wherever in the world I see it.

So I walked into the St. Louis zoo ready to see all the giraffes, hippos… that still looks and behaves like any other giraffe, or hippo… but turns out this zoo had some super memorable experiences that totally caught me by surprise.

The very first thing we saw here were these two bears pressed against the glass, jumping up and down in the water, having fun with (or trying to eat?) the little kids also pressed against the glass jumping up and down on the other side. These are the cutest bears I have ever seen. This is so the stuff of reddit r/aww top rated content- I never thought I’d see this stuff in real life.

The other very standout experience was the opposite of cute. We stumbled upon an exhibit where the trainer was laying out a bunch of… oh my, are those whole dead rabbits? After prolonged anticipation, he disappears and a pack of painted dogs whoosh! out the gate in every direction. It takes awhile for one of them to find the dead rabbit perched at the top of the stump, front and center of the exhibition. It carries it down right in front of our glass pane and rips the carcass to pieces. Some black sack spills out of the rabbit and this savage tosses it to the side to tear off another mouthful of red meat. Bravo. This whole show managed to be beautiful and unsettling at the same time.

Oh and boyfriend saw a polar bear for the first time, but it was was nowhere near as fun as the bears. And he fed stingrays too!

I don’t know if the zoo would’ve been a standout if it weren’t for those two lucky experiences, but it is still pretty amazing you can see it all for free (besides a small fee for the special exhibits like stingray feeding). Quite a steal!

Right by the zoo is Forest Park. Vast, green grass, fountains, and very serene. The second time I’ve ever tried renting an electric scooter and it yet again failed me. A throng of young people dressed up fancy and we deduced we must’ve walked into some pre-prom festivities. Walking through crowds of these kids, it was a strange and unique moment of experiencing this event again one decade later. I simultaneously experienced it as myself now ten years older and as them, wondering what their thoughts were on a day like this, trying to figure it out by reading their expressions. It was such a random bout of nostalgia and sense of clarity, of what specifically I can’t describe. But finally outside of the crowd, we sat at the edge of the water and observed, me happy for them on their special day and also happy for my now-wiser self.

You see we did a fair amount of walking around outside, but I’ve yet to mention that we had our -worst- spring allergies in St. Louis that weekend. Whether it was just the first week of true spring or whether the greenery in this city is super potent against us, we don’t know, and it didn’t make a difference, it was almost unbearable. I almost wanted to take a break and just head back to the hotel, but we decided to press forth with our plans for the day.

Anyway all that to say, when we walked into the botanical gardens, we knew we were heading into enemy territory. Neither of us know or care much about botany so I don’t remember much, but to sum it up, there are several sections to explore and each section had a theme to it. But that’s true of any botanical garden right? Well, not much else I got for ya as a non-enthusiast. Except that one of the last themes of our visit here was in the Japanese garden. It stood out for how suddenly peaceful it made us feel by simply being here.

One of our favorite things to do in any city is check out their farmers markets. The Sourlard Farmers Market had pretty standard farmers market items- fresh produce, soaps, various fragrance items, a large spice shop, fresh juice, although my memory might be limited to the things we had a potential of buying. It also had a limited number of food stalls that looked pretty popular too. The wildest thing I saw was a cage of fuzzy little chicks, and one of ducks, and one of a rabbit. Another shopper told us they have a few chicken running around their backyard and says they’re super sweet- highly recommends. They get plenty of fresh eggs. She’d buy more but her husband wouldn’t let her heheh. A side note that the people of St. Louis seem quite friendly.

But the standout feature about this farmers market is that things here are so, so affordable! At least the produce is; we didn’t really look at any of the souvenirs. We got 2 mangos for one dollar. A single dollar! It made us tempted to buy a carton of strawberries too but we couldn’t justify it because we didn’t know how we’d manage to eat all this. We also left with some different spices, pretty excited to try out the ribs rub.

To wrap up, I’ll leave you with a place to soak up nice views, over at the Three Sixty rooftop bar. Since he drove and I had my fill of drinks a few days prior, we really had no interest in drinking. But the sunset view was really satisfying from here. You get a great view into the stadium too. This stupid building blocks most of the arch from the outside bar, but the vibe out here is still worth it, especially on a good weather day. I ordered pretty much a fancier version of gin and tonic and the drink was strong and reasonably priced for a rooftop bar! That’s non-SF/NY for ya.

Well there you have it, a quick weekend in the quiet city of St. Louis. We probably won’t be back, at least not for a while, but it was still a worthwhile visit.