While not technically the largest city in Missouri (that honor belongs to Kansas City, due to some creative annexing and stupidity on St. Louis' part), the entire area's a lot bigger and more influential. Home to Budweiser, the
St. Louis Cardinals and the
Gateway Arch, this city of roughly 2.8 million people also has some good music, good food and weird customs. It's pretty much Boston-on-the-Mississippi: mostly Catholic, very insular, loves baseball a little too much, has an inferiority complex (here it's with Chicago) that we take out through baseball. It's got a lot of bad points, too: we live too much in the past, we've deluded ourselves into thinking we're either still really important or just a "
big small town", and we can't support a football team worth a damn. Overall, it's a very Midwestern city: misunderstood and a little weird.
Example:
"Where did you go to high school?"--If you can't
answer this question with something an
average person born in St. Louis can understand,
you're fucked. Seriously.