Sightseeing again, Thursday and Friday

Now that we've had an opportunity to visit our schools, it's time to do some more sightseeing. The Saint Louis, Missouri, area is filled with places to go and things to see, and it is always fun to show visitors some of the special sights here.

Thursday, we spend the morning over at the Missouri Botanical Garden. This is a walled estate in the heart of South Saint Louis, once the home of Henry Shaw, a businessman and philanthropist who came to Missouri in the early 1800's and amassed a fortune which he then used to buy land and create a series of gardens for pleasure and for study. After Shaw's death, the land and much of his fortune were converted to a charitable trust, ensuring that the gardens and the study started during his lifetime would continue to be accessible to all.

While much of the outdoor area in the garden is still dormant at this time of the year, there are early bulbs beginning to bloom and some trees showing buds. The Garden is known for its Japanese garden, Seiwa-en, and the Climatron, a geodesic dome containing a tropical environment year-round, among other attractions. My partners seem to enjoy walking through the various garden areas.

Lunch is just down the street, at Rigazzi's Restaurant on The Hill. Italian immigrants settled in this part of Saint Louis in the early 1900's, and the area is known for its Italian-American cuisine. Those of us who call the Saint Louis area home have our special favorites among the restaurants, and Rigazzi's is one of the best known.

The remainder of the day is taken up with webposting, in the computer lab at Jefferson Middle School, and later at the hotel, when we realize that our joint postings need both English and Japanese text, and it is extremely difficult to enter Japanese text on standard American keyboards.

(I recall this as a problem 2 years ago, one that my then-partner and I solved with a little bit of creativity - I created an e-mail with the English text on my laptop, then sent the message to a Yahoo account that could be accessed from a hotel computer in Tokyo, one with a Japanese keyboard that my partner could use to add the Japanese text, which we then saved to CD and took over to Kinko's to have printed.)

With our initial postings uploaded, we separate to individual activities, the Japanese to dinner and the Americans to Holy Week Maundy Thursday services.

Friday is the full day of sightseeing - we head for Forest Park. There are quite literally far more things to see and do here than can be managed in a week, let alone a day, so Joy and I have decided that we will list several of the best attractions and let our partners decide which ones to visit.

Our first stop is the world-famous Saint Louis Zoo, known for many years for its association with Marlin Perkins (Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom) and currently rated as America's #1 Zoo. The morning is warm enough to encourage quite a few of the animals to venture forth from their lairs; only the true warm-climate animals stay snug inside, so we are able to see a large number of creatures of all sorts.

My partners and I decide to have lunch at the Zoo; while there, my daughter notices one of the penny-stamp machines (with Zoo motifs available) and asks if she can have some change to make souvenirs for the Japanese. I hand her my coin purse, and she asks the teachers to join her over by the machine, where she proceeds to demonstrate how it works and asks each teacher to choose a design to be stamped. They are very intrigued with both the results and the fact that such a thing can be done with actual money; I explain that, because the end result produces something that cannot be mistaken for regular coins, the process is permitted. We discuss whether a Japanese coin could be stamped in the same way, but decide not to give it a try; the only coin that is about the right size and thickness is a 1-yen piece, but it is aluminum and much lighter in weight than an American penny, so it might cause problems within the machine.

After a Zoo visit, Joy and her partners decide that they need to finish some webposting work, so they head back to the hotel. My partners and I continue on to the Saint Louis Science Center and McDonnell Planetarium; Ishii-san is an amateur astronomer and star-gazer, and I want him to get the opportunity to see one of the star shows. We get to see many of the Science Center exhibits, and also view a star show about the Spring Equinox sky, a great way to end the afternoon.

Tired, we head back to Saint Charles and the hotel. Dinner is again an individual affair for all.