Weekend Adventures in St. Louis

Who doesn't love eating breakfast for dinner? Here in St. Louis, there is a 24 hour Waffle House just down the street from the college. Cortney, Emily, and Cortney's friend Stephen and I all took a jaunt down to the Waffle House and rather enjoyed our evening meal.

We had chocolate chip waffles, which I was not so sure of, seeing as how the combo of chocolate and syrup sounds a little sketch, but I kept an open mind and ate it and drank my orange juice with gusto. I am rather glad I did because it was quite tasty.

The only complaint I have about Waffle House is that they had a juke box, which would normally be pretty rad, but THIS particular juke box has a song by Kelly Clarkson on it. NOT OKAY!!! See the "Behind These Hazel Eyes" song title sitting there mocking me?

So the way my mandatory meal plan works here in Missouri is that I have seven meals every week where I can go to the smaller cafeteria at Provincial House (the honors college building, fondly known as ProHo) and eat as much as I like from what they have there as long as I don't take any of it outside of the dining hall. However, this is the only place I can use these meals at, and if I don't use seven in a week, they just disappear, so I try to eat there once a day or so. ProHo cafeteria is kind of the joke of the campus, as sometimes the food there is a little.........sketch. There's always something that's edible, though, so there's nothing to complain about. Hahahaha, I couldn't resist taking this picture last night of one of the dishes in the dinner line. Mmmmmmmm, peas! Hahahahaha......oh ProHo. :)

After my adventure with the peas, I took Cortney to her second classical music concert ever: the Arianna String Quartet and their premiere of my teacher, Joanna Mendoza. They played Dvorak's "American" string quartet, Janacek's "Intimate Letters" quartet (3rd movement makes me cry...), and Dohnanyi's quartet no. 3. What a concert to introduce Cortney to classical music, huh? ;) It was sooooooo good, and really viola-heavy, which I rather enjoyed. Here we are all gussied up to go to the concert, although you can't really tell. Oh well. :)

Saturday night and Sunday morning we had a storm! A lot of people from church had power outages and there were a lot of blown-over trees. A lot of buildings in St. Louis were flooded, including the basement of Powell Hall, where the SLSO and the SLSYO perform and rehearse. So for my first SLSYO rehearsal on Sunday we weren't allowed to go down there. Oh man, I'm so stoked to be rehearsing in this hall every week! The sound is so big! The orchestra isn't too bad either. ;) I'm suspending my final evaluation of it until we've done more than sightread, but so far the quality is really great. However, wherever you are, an orchestra is an orchestra and our basses still can't count....they couldn't come in right on the pizzicatos in Dvorak's 9th to save their souls! However odd this might sound, it was slightly endearing. :) The literature we're doing this concert is AMAZING but kind of funny because there is only one piece on the program I haven't played somewhere else: I've played Dvorak's 9th twice (once with OPAYCO and once with WFS), Beethoven's Egmont overture at least once (I LOVE BEETHOVEN!), I just got Mendelssohn's Sinfonia X for the UMSL orchestra this term and now we're playing it in SLSYO, and the one I haven't played is Copland's Appalachian Spring, which we don't have music for yet. I could die happy playing these pieces, though, so I'm perfectly content.

Here's the inside of Powell Hall:


As well as having some gorgeous brick architecture, St. Louis has some pretty sketch buildings as well. For example, take this one that Rachael and I passed on the way to SLSYO rehearsal. Parts of it were made of wood, parts of brick, parts of cement....I think it just has a personality disorder and is misunderstood. Nothing a good therapist can't fix.

Well, I'm off to take a shower and hit the hay. I have music theory with Dr. Ott at 8 tomorrow, and I need my beauty sleep. ;) Don't be strangers now, you hear?

With love,

Maren