Our host Shaun has some extraordinary stuff. He owns lots of historical objects and nice handmade everyday objects. He is a deformable body dynamics and thermodynamic professor at Washington University.
Here are some of the many interesting objects he has scattered in his home.
Butter with fermented milk
Selfmade cutting boards, selfblown glass infront
old telephone
inherited device to make butter
The semester fee of this University is 70.000$. For comparison the fee in Germany is usually between 200 to 400 euro per semester. This fee also tends to include public transport tickets that students can use to travel for free in a certain area.
We drove around a lot. We’ve seen so many different Universities that all look very nice.
He showed us the “University City” of St. Louis. We drove past lost of Universities. We passed by a lot of hospitals.
When I asked why there are so many hospitals in the city Shaun game me the answer: “they make money”.
There also seems to be more churches than there are in Germany. The churches operate here tax free.
There are also “black” neighborhoods. There are many poor people and there is a lot of crime. The homicide rate in 2020 was 262.
We drove past lots of private streets. This means that there is a group of people living there that hire their own security and have their own streets and speed limits and so on.
The streets are clean no matter where I’ve been so far.
Normal house in a private area
Here are some more impressions of the houses in the nice areas in St. Louis.
Germans and Italians used to build houses in St. Louis with red brick. St. Louis is a brick city.
There are a surprising number of trees in the streets. The trees seem very old and are beautiful. The houses all have a nice style to them. Be it that they have a cute chimney or having a spiral staircase.
Also the official buildings seem nicer than in Germany.
City hall of University City city
Sometimes it is hard to put into word all that is different and explain the nuances.
We drove to a fancy mall where we didn’t buy anything. Gucci and so many others stores that seem fancy but I don’t really know nor care about.
We ended up in a normal shopping mall that was huge. I got myself a sim card (AT&T) with unlimited data. We had some trouble and it seems that sometimes the systems are not really designed sophisticated.
dog section in a sock store
I ended up buying new shoes and slippers. The previous ones were used and nearly fell apart.
The loop of University City
Streetnames in University City
As you can see in the right picture in the University City the streets are named after US Universities.
The left picture shows “the loop”. There are stars on the ground with names and a short description of famous people who come from St. Louis.
Because the streets in the US are going from west to east and from north to east a easier system for addresses is used. The address of your house could be 7039, which means you live on the 70th street in the 39th house on this street.
There are also other naming conventions with highways. The general direction where the highway is headed is also given when driving onto the highway which is super great in my opinion. That would be hard to implement in Germany or other parts in the world because streets don’t usually orient themselves to north and east. Odd number means north south and even east west roads.
A picture explain this way better than I could do.
Source thedrive.com
This was the third day of theUSA trip. Read more aboutTravel. Continue reading about he next day Kayaking in the USA.