Monday, October 27, 2008

Back from the Lou!

So Alison and I got back from St. Louis last night. We left Friday around 9pm and got a first class upgrade on the way there, which was pretty rad. I do enjoy free beers. We went straight to the hotel courtesy of this odd Polish cab driver who claimed that he was good personal friends of former NYC mayor, Ed Koch. This guy also claimed to have played hockey at the University of St. Petersberg in Russia at one point. I'm not sure how truthful his stories were, but they passed the time on the way to the hotel.

We crashed pretty hard upon arrival. We stayed at the Wyndam Mayfair, a neat old hotel built in 1925. It was a bit old fashioned but nice. Saturday our friend Jeremy came to pick us up after we played around at the newly constructed Lumiere Casino in downtown St. Louis. From there we had lunch at a place called Show-Me's, which was basically a low-rent version of Hooters. Surprsingly, they had Widmer beers on tap.

From there, it was off to the set. Once everyone was there I had some make up effects applied to my head. Then I stood around for a few hours. Once everyone else was ready, we did three takes of the opening scene of the movie. I play a corpse, but I do it well apparantly. It was interesting to see it all happen - the effects work (no CGI, all old school), the acting, the camerawork and all that stuff. It was also cold. And a long night. Alison was a good sport about it all and everyone was really friendly though and that made all the difference in the world.

Sunday was play day. Jeremy came and picked us up again and after lunch and beers at a great pub called Growler's, which much to my delight carried Bridgeport IPA, we went rollerskating at Rock Roll O Rena which doens't look like it's been touched since 1973. I'm terrible at rollerskating but I only fell one and I didn't hurt myself. It probably looked odd though as it was almost all kids there and they skated circles around me.

From there, back to the airport is where we went only to find out that our flight was delayed and that we might not make our connection in Chicago. Thankfully, our travel mojo was working well and we wound up on a direct to LGA which got us in a half an hour before we were supposed to have been there in the first place. All's well that ends well, right?

It was a great trip overall, if a bit exhausting. St. Louis is an alright town despite the fact that it is second only to Detroit in terms of crime rate. There's more culture there than you'd expect and some neat areas of town to bum around in that compensate nicely for the north and eastern parts of the city that look like they were bombed and left for dead. I was amazed to hear how cheap real estate there is and with how blue the skies were. After six years in Oregon and now living in NYC, I'm not so used to the blue open skies that they have in that area.
At any rate, good times. It was over too quickly, but we'll be back.






2 comments:

The Hamzinger said...

And don't forget: It's home to the greatest hockey team in the West!

Sounds like you had a good time. I was only there once and the post-5pm desertion of downtown made me sad.

ianjane said...

The first thing Alison said when we got into downtown was 'It's so empty!' Compared to NY, it was a nice quiet change.