St Louis Road trip

Last weekend I headed off to the beautiful city of St Louis. I went with the SCF (Student Christian Fellowship) group and it was the first time I had properly left Evansville since arriving, so obviously I was pretty excited.

We arrived on Friday night and spent the evening eating pizza, chatting and playing games together. One of the best things about the weekend was that it was a great opportunity to meet new people and create new friendships, and we stayed up until about half 1 playing new games and getting to know one another.

The next day we woke up bright and early at 6.30 (not fun) and headed off to inner city of St Louis to spend the morning volunteering with a project called ‘LovetheLou’. Lou stands for St Louis, but when I first heard someone say this I thought it was love the LOO, and was NOT happy at the thought of cleaning out toilets all day. Luckily I was wrong- instead we went and worked in community gardens in one of the roughest areas of St Louis, and spent time with some of the locals there, listening to their stories and praying with them. It was a real eye opener and it would have been great to spend more time there as the place is still in so much need of help.

In the afternoon, we went to the infamous city museum, and oh. My. Goodness. It was INCREDIBLE. I’m not really sure why it’s called a museum, because really it’s just a massive 10 story adult playground. Or as the museum like to say: It’s an “eclectic mixture of children's playground, funhouse, surrealistic pavilion, and architectural marvel, in which the visitors are encouraged to touch, climb on, and play in the various exhibits.” I swear I could have spent the entire day there. Words don’t really do the place justice- I think it’s just one of those things you just have to experience yourself, but the highlights included a 10 story slide from the top to the bottom of the building, a school bus hanging half of the roof which you could go into and look down over the city, and two aero planes suspended midair which you could climb up to. Since I’m not really doing the place justice, here are some photos of it, and from the weekend in general: