I've been meaning to write about my week in St. Louis for over a month now. I was there working the Final Four just over a year after my first trip through the area. Lauren and I had come to St. Louis on the road trip. We pretty much just checked out the Arch and then moved on. We had a scary adventure trying to find a barbeque joint the night before and pretty much left with the feeling that, save for the Arch itself, St. Louis is a big old craphole of a city that we would never feel safe walking or driving through at night.

Well, that assessment pretty much still stands. When I arrived, I was amused to discover that we were staying in the very same hotel that Lauren and I had walked into to pee and buy a shotglass after our visit to the arch. The Adam's Mark right across the street. This hotel chain is supposed to be higher class, similar to a Marriot or the like. Well, save for the fact that the lobby is very pretty and most of the rooms have a more or less unobstructed view of the Arch, this hotel was horrible. For starters, me and my friend Eli ate at their restaurant and the waiter completely botched our order. Which is okay in and of itself. But then it takes him 10 minutes to come back and verify what we actually ordered. We sat for over an hour before we got our food. Then not only didn't they comp our meal which any self-respecting restaurant should have done, but on the original check they had billed us for the botched item which was less expensive. Rather than just leaving it at that, they had the cojones to add on "misc food item" to reconcile the difference in price. The meal was on the company anyway so I didn't make a big deal, but I just couldn't believe it.

Eli's reservation got screwed up and they couldn't allow him to stay for the extra day he needed so we were going to have a cot brought into my room for him to sleep on. After almost a dozen calls to the front desk, housekeeping and utilities, the cot still never showed up. Room service was horribly slow and likewise screwed up my orders more than once. This simply was NOT a nice hotel. If you plan a trip to St. Louis (and I can't imagine why) find another hotel.

Hotel aside, St. Louis, is just not a nice city. It's one of those cities where you're not in a very pretty area to begin with and then you drive one street over and you realize, whoa, I'm probably in danger for my life right now. The police presence is not what I had hoped in a city that boasts one of the highest murder rates in the country. Our hotel was close enough to walk, and they encouraged us to do so because the parking lot across the street from the stadium is notorious for local punks walking through and breaking windows. "NOTORIOUS." It literally happens every night. The company provided shuttles for us for when we had to leave the stadium after dark, but one time I left after the shuttle had stopped running and had to walk back to the hotel. Not a police car in sight the entire walk home. I basically walked really fast, pretended to talk on my cell phone the entire time, checked around corners of buildings and columns to make sure there was nobody behind them, and kept trying to hail cabs which refused to stop and pick me up. I also walked with a box cutter in my pocket just in case.

On the morning after the first set of games, the streets were littered with beer cans, half-eaten ribs and general trash. It was disgusting. The city apparently didn't think to hire an auxilliary clean up crew to make the city look nice for the remainder of the weekend. So all the tourists walking around for the next couple days did so in the stench of decaying garbage.

The only nice area I saw all week was a neighborhood called "The Hill." Our production guy took us out to dinner at a really nice Italian restaurant, which there are apparently a lot of on The Hill. The Hill is a nice quiet little area with a lot of homes and restaurants. I didn't fear for my life quite as much as in the rest of St. Louis, although it was still patchy and I found myself looking around in spite of myself as we walked.

After dinner we went to a place called Ted Drewes, a local institution in St. Louis, famous for their frozen custard. There is a terminology that goes along with frozen custard that is apparently unique to the Midwest. For example, when you order, you ask for a "concrete." This is basically the equivalent of a Dairy Queen Blizzard. The frozen yogurt at Ted Drewes was absolutely amazing. I can't even begin to describe the flavor as anything but "buttery." Just so smooth and creamy and delicious. Of course it's just about one of the worst things you could ever possibly eat, healthwise. A few days later I found out that a regular sized concrete from Ted Drewes apparently has something like 2000 calories and over 300 grams of fat. I'm not even exaggerating and I think I'm actually being conservative with my memory of this conversation. So damn, it BETTER taste good right? If you're passing through the area, I do highly recommend Ted Drewes. Apparently it's a staple stop of any good roadtripper with a taste for fine local haunts.

I was working the afternoon shift, so one morning I took a trip to the St. Louis Arch. How can you not if you're right there? I had been looking at the arch all week both from my hotel and as we walked back and forth to the stadium. After awhile, I got to thinking, "Geez, why was I so impressed with this thing the first time?" Lauren and I had loved the Arch when we were here on our road trip. We couldn't stop taking pictures of it. But during the week now, it had just looked gray and unimpressive. Tall, no doubt, but kind of ugly the more I looked at it.

When I finally walked over to the Jefferson Expansion Memorial park that morning, I remembered my initial attraction. I really think one can only truly appreciate the full beauty of the St. Louis Arch by standing directly underneath it. Only there can you understand what a feat of engineering it is, what a work of art it is. Only there can you see the sunlight play light and shadow with the angular features of the arch. Only there can you see it play optical illusions with your eyes as the bright stainless steal seems to bend differently depending on where you're standing. I laid on a bench looking straight up at the arch for about 20 minutes waiting for the museum underneath to open. And it was just beautiful. If this were the image the rest of St. Louis could project, I'd have nothing bad to say about the city.

I had wanted to come back and spend time down in the Museum of Westward Expansion which is underground beneath the Arch. The last time we were here, Lauren and I had been starving and ended up rushing our visit in order to go find some breakfast. One of the things I wanted to spend more time reading was a long timeline history of the United States during the 1800's. One of the things I'd noticed the last time here was how matter-of-factly they stated certain things. So much so that if you'd turned off your brain, you wouldn't realize just how badly we'd screwed over the Indians. For example, it would say that in such and such a year, "Seminole Indians ceded Flordia to the United States." CEDED. Yes I'm sure that exactly what happened. I'm sure the conversation went more like, "Okay, you Indians get the f--- out of here or we're going to kill all of you."

I mentioned in my road journal that the museum really ought to have had a section dedicated to the plight of the Indians. Of course the Westward Expansion was important to our country, but at least acknowledge the people we screwed over in the process. Now that I had time to walk around, I realized that there was, in fact, just such a section. It wasn't as robust as I would have liked to have seen, but they do mention the different tribes that were displaced, some of the important Indian personages, and even tell a few anecdotes, about settlers and politicians lying, scheming and cheating the Indians, that would make anybody ashamed to be white.

One thing that really stuck out at me was something I read about Abraham Lincoln in the timeline I mentioned before. The country was obviously very divided when Lincoln became president. Even before he came into office, the country was split between North and South. Slave states and free states. The northern states, while they opposed slavery, it appears as though they were more worried about keeping the southern states in the Union. While Lincoln was a senator, he apparently made it quite clear that he was opposed to slavery, which angered a lot of people in the NORTH, because they worried he'd anger the southern states enough to secede. Apparently as soon as he was elected president, several Southern states pulled out of the Union immediately. Later on, he made a speech outwardly decrying slavery no ifs ands or buts. Within the next couple months a half dozen more states pulled out. People in the U.S. government and the northern states were furious with Lincoln for "preaching" his views and "dividing the nation." Even though they didn't agree with slavery either, they also didn't want to stick their noses into a situation that wasn't their business. They preferred to maintain the peace with the southern states rather than risk pissing them off… even though hundreds of thousands of blacks were still being enslaved.

The whole scenario reminds me of George W. Bush. I've made this comparison before, although carefully, around people I know. People immediately ask, "Are you seriously comparing George Bush to Abraham Lincoln." And I quickly have to backtrack and say, "no, just the situations are similar."

But now… yes I'm comparing George W. Bush to Abraham Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln was accused of dividing the nation. George Bush is accused of the same thing. Abe was chastised because he wasn't letting the southern states "be sovereign". George was accused of the same thing in Iraq. Both men were fighting against evil and tyranny and both had the guts to call "Evil" by its name. Both took the country into an unpopular war because they believed that the cause was right. On the flip side, both wars can never be considered completely altruistic in nature. While slavery was a big part of the Civil War, Lincoln was also primarily concerned with keeping the Union in tact, including the southern states. Bush, while trying to end Saddam Hussein's tyranny also has oil interests at heart. For several years Abraham Lincoln was probably one of the most hated men in the world because of what he was standing for and sending other people to die for. George Bush is going through that very thing right now. History has proven Lincoln to be a genius. It's hard for us to imagine that there was ever a time when people doubted him. But during his time in office, people were speaking of him the same way they are speaking of Bush right now. The situations are IDENTICAL.

I've said this before as well. History will either prove George Bush to be a colossal genius or a colossal failure. If everything goes according to his idealistic plan, and Iraq is the first of many dominos to fall in the Middle East… if this victory leads to other countries demanding democracy… if in a hundred years, the Middle East is a bastion of liberty and freedom from tyranny, then history will show that it all started with George W. Bush. History won't remember that it was an unpopular war. It will only remember the results. Just like with the Civil War. It was fought, and it was horrible, but today there is no more slavery on American soil.

But anyway, enough history. The bulk of my week in St. Louis was spent inside a football arena called "The Dome." For basketball, they divide the stadium in half with a curtain and put all the TV trucks on one side and the court on the other. That gets to you after awhile, being inside and not even seeing the sun through windows. You start to think it's nighttime all the time. They tried to change the colors of the lights to simulate day and night. During the day hours, the lights were white. At night, they switched over to orange, to try and help the staff's internal body clocks along. But I still got sick by mid-week. I actually spent the duration of the first two games inside our production trailer with my head down on the desk, trying to sleep. The rest of the crew was either out near the court watching or else watching the game from a jumbotron screen on our side of the stadium.

I ate a ton of fruit and drank a lot of water and stayed bundled up and was able to sweat out my cold within a day, which was great.

On the day between games, St. Louis actually did do something kind of nice. They sponsored an outdoor event along this long promenade complete with food and drink and free concerts. I went down there after my shift with one of the other techs, Rhett. It was a fun day. They were selling beer along the promenade and you could drink it outside. Either the open container law didn't apply in St. Louis, or they were just looking the other way this weekend. Kelly Clarkson gave a free concert. As much as I detest American Idol and all that it stands for, I must say I really like Kelly Clarkson. Once she got past her initial schmaltzy ballad phase, a lot of her songs are pretty fun and catchy. She even sang a B.B. King song at this concert and did a really cool sexy rendition of it. So that day was rather fun.

But by the end of the week, the combination of being in a really crappy city, recovering from a cold, and living in a cave were getting to me and I just got really depressed. All I wanted to do was go home and see my family. Lauren had called and left a message telling me that she missed me and Allison missed me and that she kept saying "Da da. Da da." Then all of a sudden in the background, I hear Allison say, "DA daaaaa… daaaaa…" I played that message over and over again just to hear my little girl's voice. I've still actually got the message saved on my phone.

The pack up took way longer then I expected after the last game and I was packing up until almost 4 in the morning. Then I had to come back at 9 am to make sure all my stuff got shipped out before dashing to catch my plane back to Philly. Back home to my girls.

So bottom line. St. Louis does have a few good features, but it's not enough to redeem the entire city from its own craphole status. If you're passing through the area, you're better off just checking out the good things and then moving along… quickly. Otherwise, give it a wide berth.