This restaurant is literally next door to the one in Boston's North End seen in yesterday's post. I like a limoncello after dinner at an Italian restaurant. Grappa is a little hard on my throat.
Today is another travel day, ending at a very different scene. And tomorrow is City Daily Photo's July theme day. Let's see some transparent processes!
I won't be able to get new local material until we are back for the Fourth of July. For now, a shot from Boston's historically Italian neighborhood, the North End. It has one terrific restaurant after another and we try to visit whenever we are in the city.
Kelly and Marcellus take a victory lap, so to speak, after making it official. They have known one another since seventh grade and were high school sweethearts. They stuck together while work took him to Boston for two years and she remained in New York. Their wedding was postponed by Covid. Looks to me like it was worth the wait.
We got back from Boston today. Two days in STL and then drive to Kansas City for another niece's wedding. Makes me feel like the country music truck driver's song, Six Days On The Road And I'm Gonna Make It Home Tonight.
My niece, Kelly, reading the wedding vows she wrote. That's the thing these days. After this scene, her husband, Marcellus, read his.
I do not do weddings but I got a seat on the center aisle and the light was a gift - 5 PM, cloudless, as the sun was getting lower behind the audience. Maybe I should develop a side hustle.
We made it out of Boston yesterday and drove to Cape Cod, a summer mecca in the northeastern U.S. My niece is getting married today on the beach at Chatham, right at the elbow of the Cape. We drove around yesterday, stopping at a small fishing harbor surrounded by sand bars. Dozens of seals hang out there, happy to make lunch from the fishermen's scraps.
Like other big, prosperous American cities, Boston seems to have tall, shiny buildings going up all over the place. We've seen it in New York, Seattle and parts of LA. When they cluster together they can create patterns that look almost cubist. (Note: you do not see this happening in St. Louis.)
Come to Boston (Seaport district).
Well, our friendly airline canceled the morning flight from St. Louis to Boston yesterday. Fortunately, there was space on another flight some hours later. We got to the hotel in time for a late dinner (which was very good). So this is where our trip didn't go so far.
The complex play of curves and lines reminds me of early 20th Century semi-abstract art. There is a lot of energy in the action of the trapeze artists at Circus Flora.
St. Louis is back in the oven today while we are off to cooler climes.
People across the ring from us at Circus Flora. They were watching a high wire act in which a man walked out on the cable carrying his balance pole in one hand and a chair in the other. It had a square wooden base. The artist proceeded to balance the chair on the wire, sit down on it and then raise his feet in the air. Amazing.
Tuesday is a travel day. I may run a bit more of the circus images but we will have a change of scene soon.
These young performers at Circus Flora had what you might call a dance-acrobatics routine. They were terrific. I can only wonder about how many hours of practice and exercise it would take to learn to do this.
Does your city have a Fringe Festival? When one of the most prestigious arts festivals in Europe re-started after World War II, they would not admit the odd, the experimental and the out-there. So those artists said bleep you, we'll have our own. And thus was the Edinburgh Fringe Festival born.
And now there are offshoots all over the world. The St. Louis Fringe Festival takes place in mid-August. I'm the house photographer and a member of the board of directors. It's the highlight of my image making year. We just had a taste last weekend. Our executive director, Matthew Kerns (MFA, mind you), starred in a production of An Act of God, assisted by actor-comedian-pediatrician Ken Haller. It's a provocative comedy by longtime Saturday Night Live writer David Javerbaum. Matt, as God, has had about enough of us and visits to announce a new set of rules relevant to what we have become. It made you laugh and think.
There were demonstrations across the U.S. yesterday demanding greatly increased regulation of firearms. They were organized by March For Our Lives, founded by a survivor of the Parkland school shooting in Florida. The anger keeps rising and rising with every massacre, people like these take to the streets, and yet nothing ever happens. The culture of much of this country and big money political influence make lots of lawmakers rigid, as I see it, valuing firearms over lives. And since voting districts can be so manipulated in this country and one party leans toward throwing out election results it doesn't like, I fear for the future.
Ellie wanted to play the mini golf course at Union Station. I have no talent for golf or any other athletic endeavor but is was easy to play along with her. What I really liked, though, was looking down on the players from on high while we were on the wheel. Could I cause someone's ball to tilt a tiny bit into a trap?
Another photo from the top of the St. Louis Wheel. What was the train shed of Union Station is in the foreground. The building with the pitched roof and tower was the head house of the station, now a fancy hotel. If you look closely you can see our second, antique Ferris wheel, just to the left of a radio/TV broadcast tower. It's mounted on the roof of the City Museum.
I've posted pictures of the right/south side of this building before (e.g., https://tinyurl.com/dvp3r6vh) but not so much the west side. This photo, taken from the top of our Ferris wheel, shows a building that started out as a shoe warehouse (we used to make more shoes than anybody) and later became vacant. It was rehabbed into a combination of a hotel and condos. The trompe l'oeil facade was part of the rehab project and has held up well.
It seems like just about every city has a Ferris wheel these days. We actually have two and you can see one from the other, but the second is an antique and much smaller, https://tinyurl.com/29vvsbpy. I've seen some very long lines here but it was remarkably uncrowded on the day I took Ellie to Union Station. Got some good shots from up high, which I'll come to.
There is a jellyfish tank at the St. Louis Aquarium. Nothing else in it besides the creatures and dark walls. They often shine colored lights on them for an oh wow effect--the original of this picture was in blues--but to me nothing captures their fine structure and other-worldliness better than simple black and white.
Not the usual pose for a beginning of the week pic of the kid. The aquarium has a pool at child height containing what are sometimes called doctor fish, or, more properly, garra rufa, found in parts of the Middle East and Southeast Asia. They have no teeth and will nibble dead skin from humans, leading to their use for pedicures in some places. This may not be such a good idea and the practice is illegal in some countries and several U.S. states (but not this one). https://www.healthline.com/health/beauty-skin-care/fish-pedicure#safety-issues
It feels like tickling to most people. Ellie thought it was a hoot and could hardly pull herself away.
Our aquarium is not up there in the rankings for size and scope. There is one main tank with lots of species, along with several smaller containers. Ellie and I spotted these divers who had what looked like a vacuum and scrub brushes. She wanted to know what they were doing. A staff member told us they were cleaning food debris and fish poop. It's a tough job but someone has to do it.
BFF is an acronym that my granddaughter and children her age use for Best Friends Forever. It may be aspirational but it's a sweet sentiment. Now that school is out for the summer, when her mom has to work and she is at our house it sometimes falls to me to keep her occupied. On Thursday, she and I went to St. Louis Union Station, once one of the great railway junctions of America. That went kaput, of course, but it has been redeveloped into a fancy hotel and a large, overpriced, entertainment center catering to families.
The first thing she wanted to do was the aquarium. Not huge but fun for kids of her age. She was fascinated by these very friendly turtles who perhaps intended to be BFFs.
The Chinese cultural festival show, like all shows, must come to an end. Are we all, as Ed Sullivan used to say, a really big show? I'll leave that question to another day. It's time to move on to something new.
OOPS - a commenter thought I was ending the blog. No, I'm just changing to another topic.
I don't know if you would describe this woman as a juggler, acrobat or something else, but she was a big hit at the Chinese Cultural Festival. This is her thing, keeping umbrellas spinning using all four extremities. The announcer said she holds the world record for keeping ten of them going at the same time. Being a bit on the clumsy side, I just can't imagine it.
It's quo vadis day at City Daily Photo. This is the interchange in downtown St. Louis between a couple of major highways and a bridge from Missouri to Illinois. It was taken from a nearby office building overlooking the scene.
