City Museum of St. Louis

I dont even know where to start with this post.  Emily and I went to a museum on Saturday.  When I hear or see the word museum, I think of nerdy (and I mean nerdy in a good way....huge nerd right here as you all know) academic location to showcase great works or crowning achievements.  With this museum.......please erase that notion from your mind.  I would much rather call the City Museum the City Expression of Art and Creative Genius Arena.  It's a photographers muse.  It's a sculptures wildest dream come to life.  It's a painters muse.  It's visual overload at it's best.  You enter and immediately feel like you've been transported to another dimension.  There are no maps.  There are no tour guides.  It is your opportunity to explore, absorb, and feel inspired.  It was simply amazing.  My pictures won't nearly do it justice because the majority of the time, Em and I were just walking around in a wanderlust of amazement. 

Right when we arrived, the lady near the ticket booth told us that a circus was going on on the 3rd floor and if we wanted to catch the tail end to go straight there.  We took her advice, and got to see acrobats soaring through the air.....that blur is a guy jumping through the top hoop.

Em wanted a stare down

Entire "library" of any insect you could possibly think of.  It was beautiful.

Entertainment

Stairwell on the main level

We got tickets to go on the rooftop on the 11th floor.  There was a ferris wheel, several slides, a school bus hanging off the side of the building, and a gigantic preying mantis.

We didn't know what this was...

...so I made Em go climb up it.

beautiful views of downtown

the view of the bus on the rooftop from the ferris wheel

looking up

being a kid and going down a slide....oh yah, we went down every slide in the place (I just tried re-counting again and I got to 16.)

Previous picture taken at the top of the slide near the mantis.

horse sculpture made entires of wrenches and wheels

Did I mention the bus hung off the side of the building?

...and you could climb in it?

Area of the museum called "Monstro-city".  The lighting in the pic is a little too bright, but at the top you can see three people climbing in what looks like mid-air...

The sky is actually just filled with metal tunnels like this that you can crawl from one mid-suspended airplane to the top of a dragons mouth that's a slide, to a birds nest, to walking down a crane shaft. It felt like you were in an enormous metal tree house. 

It started getting dark out so we headed back inside to the "Caves".  You entered and immediately felt like you were far underground in a cavern with stalagtites and stalagmites all around you.  There were hidden passageways and every opportunity to forget that you were actually in a former shoe factory that was abandoned downtown.  This picture is at the very bottom floor looking up at the 10-story slide we were eventually going to go down.  It used to be the "shoe-shaft" where when the shoe warehouse was operational, the workers on each floor would throw their finished shoes to go down to loading docks for shipment.

getting lost and having fun in the caves

At the top looking down....it was dark! At the bottom when we both stood up, we were crazy dizzy from all the spins.

Very many pictures and very short story short(er).....if you come visit....we will be going here.  If you know someone visiting St Louis....they need to go here.  We were there for almost 4 hours and we still didn't see half of the museum.  Such an amazing experience!!