Wednesday, December 16, 2015

St. Louis

A few weeks ago we made a quick trip up to St. Louis.  Busch Stadium was hosting the first game of the US Soccer National Team’s World Cup Qualifying Campaign for the 2018 World Cup.  I’ve been to countless FC Dallas games, but never a National Team game, so we booked tickets before they all sold out and drove up to Missouri.  The US did manage to beat their opponent, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, with a score of 6-1.  I didn’t take my camera with me to the game, so I didn’t get any pictures of downtown St. Louis this time.

All the hotels downtown were either booked or were ridiculously expensive, so we ended up staying a few miles away near Forest Park. It’s a neat section of St. Louis – along with the large park there are many old historic buildings. The next day we stopped at one of them, the Saint Louis Art Museum. Located in Forest Park, the art museum sits in one of the only remaining buildings that was constructed for the 1904 World’s Fair. There is a lot of great art there (although it could definitely have more photography), including some places where it looks like the art is checking out the art.

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We then went to the Cathedral Basilica of Saint Louis, which was just a few miles away. The massive church was constructed between 1907 to 1914, although the interior took much longer to complete.

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Nearly every inch of space inside the cathedral is covered with mosaics. This is actually one the largest collection of mosaics in the world, containing 41.5 million pieces of glass in more than 7,000 colors, covering more than 83,000 square feet.

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While construction on the cathedral ended in 1914, it took until 1988 to complete all of the mosaics.

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After that we then went to the IKEA store in St. Louis, where we purchased a new dresser for the baby’s nursery. It’s been a few weeks since this trip, and I’m still slowly trying to figure out how to get the dresser assembled. The baby is due in two months, which will probably be about as long as it'll take to put it all together.

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