Even though I was sad at the end of my Ozark visit to go away from everyone, I was excited because some of the folks were coming up here. The first two weeks of July my parents were up visiting, which was fun. After they left I had four days to get the apartment ready again, sheets washed and ready for the next set of folks to come in…one of my best friends (the chef) and another one of our best friends. This particular best friend, is also the twin of my buddy who I had been texting and staying up late to talk to on the phone. I desperately wanted to tell her what was going on, but my buddy and I still had to keep everything under wraps, after all my buddy and I hadn’t even gone on a date yet…or rather our second “first” date.
My girlfriends came up and from the start, it was like old times. The night of their arrival we stayed up late talking, eating popcorn, drinking coffee and shooting the breeze. Before we knew it, we should have been in bed hours ago in order to prepare for the next day’s adventure; The City Museum.
This is a place that was shown to me by some local St. Louis buddies in 2004 for my birthday and since then I’ve made it my duty to show anyone else from out of town the wonder of this museum created from an artist’s mind. The chef friend had been there on a couple of occassions, the other friend had never been. One of the great things about this place, even if you’ve been, you’re always going to find something new, mainly because they keep building new additions and there is so much to look at you’ve surely missed something the first time.
The newest attraction to myself and the other girlfriend; the roof. I’d never been and neither had they. We made this our mission. It was here we found rope swings, a gigantic Praying Mantis…
and slides that made me scream like a little girl every time we went down one…
oh yeah and a giant ferris wheel…
We didn’t care the weather was so hot, we had to explore every ounce of that roof to say we did it.
We even wound up going back toward the end of the night. However before going back on the roof, we had to make a quick stop at Beatnik Bob’s located in the middle of the museum…
Unfortunately Beatnik Bob’s didn’t have cotton candy so I went to another vendor, purchased some and came back to where my friends were to share…
Needless to say after my friend laughed so hard she pulled cotton candy out of her nose we knew it was time to quit sharing.
We were at the museum for several hours making sure we got our money’s worth, even Benjamin Franklin would have been proud.
The next day I had to work but was meeting up with the girls afterwards to go to the art museum. For the Creatively Put readers out there, here is a little background information on the art museum. The building itself was originally built in 1904 as part of the World’s Fair and they tore down everything from it except one part. They built the rest of the museum to match. However, we weren’t going to see the architectural splendor, we were going to see some mummies. The chef friend had never seen a mummy before, had always wanted to and so the three of us turned this trip into another adventure.
We went into the art museum and headed downstairs to the exhibit before the museum closed. As we turned down one hallway my chef friend and I started to get a creepy feeling. We didn’t know what it was. We were so spooked by the time the three of us saw the mummy we had convinced ourselves we had felt a presence of some sort and that someone was tapping the glass from the inside of one of the exhibits.
After seeing the mummy exhibit, the one friend quickly got distracted and started talking to one of the guards there and asking questions. Come to find out, we weren’t the only ones who got a creepy feeling in the hallway. Some of the guards who man the building at night would also experience a feeling, so much to the extent they would feel threatened and wouldn’t continue down the hallway.
As the guard told us, they didn’t believe it was the spirit of the mummy haunting the hallways, but felt it was something to do with the shrunken head in one of the displays further down the hallway,…which is where I originally got the creepy feeling.
We went back in search of the shrunken head passing up the many Mayan exhibits, Native American Exhibits to get to this exhibit from Papau New Guinea. Either way, we found something unsettling, whether it was the visual of a shrunken human head with its eyes sewn shut or the extra natural artifacts added to it, something about it creeped us out.
The museum was coming to a close so we had to make our way out but first stopped to see the Asian Arts exhibit.
After seeing a shrunken head and getting the creeps there is always something calming about seeing Buddhas and Foo Dogs.
We paused for a moment to take some glamorous pictures on the bridge outside of Art Hill…
where we talked on the way to the car. My friend said she felt sorry for me when I had to come back home to visit them because there was nothing to do there. What she forgot was, when we hung out together in the Ozarks, we relied on ourselves and created our own fun because we enjoyed each others’ company. We didn’t need anything to entertain us, we were our own entertainment. After the other girlfriend and I convinced her of this, we suddenly realized how hungry we were.
We then stopped at a well known restaurant on Grand street and realized there was no way we were going to make it through the wait before our stomachs ate themselves. Instead we went back down the street to a little Thai restaurant.
After ordering, my chef friend started in about how she could create her own curry at home and why she didn’t know why she ordered curry if she could make it herself. Then the waiter brought out a huge bowl of soup to the other table. She immediately looked at the bowl and said, “Oooh, I should have ordered that.” I reminded her that the curry made at this place was going to be different than anything she could make, and besides that, when you cook something yourself, its not nearly as good as when someone else cooks it for you. (It’s a rule I came up with.)
The waiter brought our food to the table. We had expelled so much energy over the last couple of days we devoured our plates in no time. (O.K. I devoured my plate in no time.)
My chef friend was taking her time making yummy noises and savoring every last drop of her food and exclaiming, “O.K. this is waaaay better than anything I could have made at home.” We left the restaurant pleased knowing we had made a wonderful meal decision and decided to bum around town some more. Unfortunately we don’t have any pictures from this time because it was mostly spent just shopping.
We then found ourselves hungry again and decided we should make plans for another dinner. My chef friend wanted more curry but wanted to try a different restaurant.
Curry twice in one day you ask dear readers? Yes. Yes we did.
There is a restaurant near my apartment that has a great buffet but we went during dinner hours and ordered yet again, curry. This time however we ordered some wonderful Naan bread to go with it. We again cleaned our plates while we watched excerpts from Bollywood movies. After we paid our bill we sat outside while the girls had a smoke. My chef friend wanted to stay an extra day, she was contemplating calling out sick to work to stay since I had the next day off. She didn’t want to go, I didn’t want them to go. Before we knew it, we had to head back to the apartment to get their luggage and send them home.
Before they went home, my friend had to check some things on the internet, and we’ll put it this way, the curry had done a number on all of us, but mostly me. While she was checking something on the computer, something happened. I’ll spare you the details, but it involved me running out of the room, slamming the bathroom door screaming, “NO! NO! NOOOOOOooo!” Thus the new term coined by one of my girlfriends, “Currying yourself”.
How much fun can you cram into a weekend? What have you done recently that was a whirlwind?
As always readers…
Next up, “Nice Hat”.
Creatively Put 
Awesome blog and great photography skills