There are relationships that just happen and then there are relationships that require hard work. Such is my complex relationship with St. Louis. I still haven’t been able to feel this city as my own and integrate it into my way of being.
Today I’m in St. Louis to have my fingerprints taken for immigration purposes, so I decided to use this opportunity to walk around the city and try to figure it out. Right now I’m having a raspberry mocha in a non-chain, real coffee-shop and planning my classes on my Kindle. Then I will go to the legendary Left Bank Bookstore because if there is anything that can reconcile me to a city, it’s shopping for books.
Another city I always had an uneasy relationship with is New York. Before visiting it, I spend several years watching Law & Order reruns with my sister. As a result, we became convinced that New York was a city where there was a corpse under every bush and a rapist or a killer around every corner.
The first time I went to New York, my sister was so worried that she told me to call her on the phone every half hour. “If more than 30 minutes pass without you getting in touch,” she said, “I will contact the police and they can start searching for you.”
My friends and I got to New York on a beautiful September day. My friends were eager to show me the city and suggested we take a walk in Central Park.
“No!” I almost screamed. “I’ll never go to Central Park because that’s where all the rapists are!”
Eventually, I realized that one can spend a day in New York without becoming a victim of violent crime but the sense of unease I associate with the city never entirely dissipated.
The cities where I felt immediately at home the moment I arrived there are Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore, London, Kiev, Coimbra, Lisbon, and Seville.
Clarissa's Blog 
Recalling that Opera Theatre of St. Louis performs operas only in English, I am reminded that you once said that you preferred listening to opera in languages you do not understand. Have you attended any opera productions at OTSL, and if so how are you feeling about them? If not, will this fact prevent your doing so?
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A good question. Yes, we’ve been to the St. Louis opera. We heard Evgeni Onegin last year. I’m glad we went but it was by far not the best performance I have visited. This is a beautiful opera but the level of the performers within the company was very uneven. Lenski was amazing. Tatiana was OK. Onegin was the weakest, which really undermined the entire performance. We didn’t get expensive seats because N was still unemployed then, so the quality of the sound that reached us was not very good. I want to go again this season, though, because I love opera too much to live without it. And opera is not something that you can really listen to in recording. I have a huge collection of Pavarotti in recording but compared to what it felt like to listen to him live, the difference is equal to one between kissing a person you love and kissing their photo. The Pavarotti performance I was fortunate to visit was a sublime experience that I will never forget.
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The St Louis Zoo was one of the first animal-friendly zoos, if there IS such a thing. They got rid of cages and did the landscaping, one of the first to do that.
I took LSD in the monkey house once.
“Welcome to the monkey house”
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I’ve never been to the STL zoo but I’m very happy to hear they got rid of cages. As a child, I always suffered enormously when I saw poor caged animals at the zoo in my city.
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hi Clarissa, I’m wondering if you have visited the Missouri Botanical Gardens? If I were to visit St Louis, that would be the first place I would go!
What was is about Philadelphia that made you feel so at home? I lived there for 8 years, but I am much more “at home” in rural areas — now I live in far northern New York State.
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I still haven’t managed to go to the Botanical Gardens, believe it or not. Something always happens whenever I try to go. But this April I’m going for sure.
I don’t know why I like Philadelphia so much but I felt at home the moment I arrived there.
I also lived in upstate New York. Beautiful nature! And the apple season was paradise.
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Your local hockey team is the best team of the NHL so far. Go St. Louis!
My experience with St. Louis, where I stopped for three hours at the bus terminal, is obviously limited: 1) the historic downtown looks beautiful, 2) the suburbs scared me (where are the people! Homes and homes and homes but no people in the street!), 3) someone stole my dirty shirt in the bus station.
The only city I felt at home the moment I arrived there was Philadelphia. I am not kidding. This city still haunts me. So I am deeply jealous of that friend of mine who got my dream job in that city.
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Oh, we have a hockey team?? How come I’m not aware? I’m clueless.
I also had a dream job in Philadelphia but they didn’t want me because I really bombed at the interview. But then a senior colleague told me that the department there is a horrible place where senior faculty members devour young academics. So it’s all for the best, I guess.
I was so bad at that interview that I couldn’t name a single XVIIIth century author I worked on in my own dissertation.
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And Philadelphia is an XVIIIth century city par excellence…
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