Meeting Salvador Dali in St. Petersburg

St. Petersburg is such a nice sunny city- it's actually called "The Sunshine City" for holding a record of consecutive number of days with sun.  I took a walk around the pretty city- which starts off kinda confusing.  You have to look at the street number (1st, 2nd, 3rd...) then if it's a street or avenue, then if it's north or south.  So, you could be at the intersection of 1st St.N and 2nd Ave. S, but be looking for 1st St S and 2nd Ave N or something like that.  Took me a bit to get the hang of it. 

I walked down to the Pier (I like Navy Pier much better) and hopped on the 25 cent trolley, as I was eyed by the many pelicans lounging around. 

I saw the Benoit Hotel, St. Mary's Church, St. Mary's comfort station, a bunch of banyan trees (those have roots coming down from the top of the tree to the ground), the oldest open air post office from 1916 (mail still gets delivered downtown by bicycle), and the local museums.  The Benoit Hotel was built with $3million dollars and was the most expensive room to rent at $20 a night.  In the seventies, it got so run down that the room rate dropped to $7 a night then, shortly after, was closed down for about 18 years- before it was renovated for 93million dollars!  It's a really nice looking hotel. 

The story of St. Mary's Church and St. Mary's "comfort station" is a fuzzy one: the architect was asked to build a public restroom near the beach--> he called it St. Mary's comfort station in 1927.  Two years later he was asked to build a structure that would become St. Mary's Church... it was said that he built the church and wasn't paid enough so when he was asked to build a public restroom, he designed it to represent the church (at a smaller scale) as kind of a joke.  Only thing is, the comfort station is recorded as being built first.  Hmmm. 

The trolley dropped me at the Dali museum, where I was blown away by the collection there.  Seeing the paintings in life allow one to see so much more of the double imaging and representative figures.  A new building will be open Jan of 2011, and will house more works and larger exhibits.  I was glad to have seen the last exhibit before the move to a new location.