St Louis

St Louis is 2 hours away from where we live and is our nearest major city. On Thurday 11th November all of the International Military personnel (14 in total) and their families if they wanted to, travelled to the military cemetry in St Louis and met up with the International RAF personnel based in the area to hold/host a joint memorial service also attended by a few members of the public, notably a selection of individuals with distant Scottish relatives. Rememberance Day is called Veterans Day over here and is marked by a national holiday on the 11th, as opposed to the UK where we are generally required to attend a memorial service on the Sunday. It was a small but lovely outdoor service, most of which I missed because Mini Monkey was not content standing at the back with me and seemed determined to take center stage so we went for a walk in the sunshine and found a drinking fountain which did the trick of keeping her entertained until the service ended. We then went to lunch with all of the others before heading off to our hotel. We almost walked back out of the hotel thinking we had walked in the wrong doors or something - there were quite literally hundreds of people crammed into the reception area, long snaking queues for check-in and a table overflowing with name badges. It turned out it was the annual, national convention for the Church of Our Lord and it was being hosted all weekend in our hotel. Once we finally got to the check-in we were surprised to be upgraded to a suite - but I guess they must have been running out of standard rooms. Once we had decided to tear ourselves out of our beautiful hotel room we had a short wander around the City and walked around the base of the arch (basically a huge arch which serves as a landmark and tourist attraction). We then met up with the others for a quick meal before heading out to watch the ice-hockey (organised by one of the Canadian families). We were a little bit concerned about Mini-Monkey's ability to sit through the entire match but it seemed that popcorn, coke and constantly standing up, throwing our arms in the air and cheering was enough to entertain her. It was actually really good fun and we must try to attend a few of the American sports matches whilst we are here. We headed home the next day and had a quiet night in before driving out to Osage Lake on the Saturday to attend a Marine Corps Ball at one of the large hotels there. There is also a large designer retail outlet here and we obviously found time to pop in and purchase a few more Tommy Hilfiger items to try and add to our 'Family Hilfiger' image (so cheap it is ridiculous I can buy polo style t-shirts from about 4 pounds and jumpers from about 6 pounds in the clearance section). The hotel opened up one of its conference rooms upstairs for childcare and we dropped Mini-Monkey off kicking and screaming before heading down for the ball. It is so interesting to attend the American functions, they are really different to ours. It is a while ago now so I can't remember the exact order of events but after we were all seated some soldiers in uniform carried the various flags in. The ball was held in honour of the Marine Corps 'Birthday' so an enormous cake was wheeled in next and an official cake cutting and tasting ceremony followed involving the senior people there. Then they mixed a grog, a rather random assortment of spirits and soft drinks, then a video about the current role of the Marines, a recorded message from the head of the Marines and then a speech from the senior person present. By this point we had been sat at our tables about 1.5hrs looking at our starters (salad pre-laid on the table). Then we had food and once the meal had finished at least half of the people went straight home/to bed which seems to be pretty standard here, parties tend to start and finish early. Then the band came on and I learnt a bit of line dancing before it just became free-style type dancing. We then went and got Mini-Monkey and let her have a little dance before heading off to bed ourselves.