McGuirks

30th October, 2011

Today I went to Mass in a church literally 3 mins walk from Amelia's house. In the afternoon, we went for lunch in an Italian-named cafe, where I had tasty french toast. We were hoping to go to the Museum of Contemporary Religious Art in St. Louis University but we had trouble finding the place and it was just about to close to we decided to forget about it. At 5pm we went to Amelia's church. It is an small independent church that reminded me very much of the Vineyard church that I went to in Minneapolis. There was guitar music and a long homily. I met some of the people from the Halloween party the previous night.

Afterwards we went to McGuirk's irish Pub for some dinner and folk music. I had toasted ravioli, which is apparently a St. Louis thing. I tried their McGuirk's Irish Ale, which was okay and their Guinness which was not good (you never know what you are going to get if you order Guinness in the US). There was a band playing folk music (see photo above). They played a lot of Irish folk. I was surprised to hear people joining in for many of the Irish songs, including The Fields of Athenry (even the extra bits). At one point, some guy started doing Irish dancing and he wasn't too bad. They also played the Baseball song as the St. Louis Cardinals just won the World Series on Friday and the music from the Budweiser Christmas ad (of course, Budweiser is from St. Louis). Finally two bagpipers came marching in. Amelia said that bagpipers usually only play two songs - Amazing Grace and  that Scottish tune that everyone knows but whose name I don't know (and they played both). Overall a fun evening was had.