Thursday, July 2, 2015

"Minnesota Nice"? (Day Two)

On our second full day, we decided to take a little road trip.

Of course every good road trip starts with a huge breakfast, so we walked out to a restaurant called Hell's Kitchen (it's in a basement and has a very goth theme) near our hotel in downtown Minneapolis.  Keeping with our tradition of splitting our restaurant plates, we shared an order of lemon ricotta hotcakes and an order what passes for huevos rancheros in Minnesota.
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The huevos rancheros-ish dish consisted of a deep fried flour tortilla topped with hash browns, beans, scrambled eggs, cheese, salsa, and sour cream. We opted to add guacamole to our dish and I also had a side of bacon to go with mine. The food was very tasty and the decaf coffee was amazing.
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(I took that in the bathroom on the way out. There were a series of those kinds of pictures that look normal from one angle and then have this scary effect from the other angle. I like them. I could never live with one, but I do like them.)

After breakfast, we took a bit of a stroll around downtown Minneapolis (mostly to look for an ATM, which we couldn't find). I took a few pictures of the buildings. I like the mix of older, brick buildings and newer, mirrored buildings that reflect the historical buildings. It's very witty.
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The murals are nice (but I miss graffiti).
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I liked the old bus coming through the window of the transit office.
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We walked back to our hotel, finished packing up, and settled our bill. (It is not a cheap place, the Grand, but it was nice, quiet, and centrally located.) We retrieved our car from the valet service and, as we were driving away from the hotel, we spotted this guy just walking down the street with his white tuba wrapped around himself, as you do.
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Bye, white tuba guy!
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The ultimate hipster accessory!
Dave wanted to show me the nearby town of Eagan, where his company offices are and where he normally stays.  We drove around all the Eagan hotspots of which there are, like, two. Then we stopped at Starbucks and the local grocery store and picked up some road snacks.
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On the way out of town, we drove by the Eagan community center and noticed a sign for an arts and crafts fair that was going on that day. Of course we had to stop and look at some arts and crafts--
Eagan mn

--and visit the food stalls:
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 We bought a pendant and mug (from two different, local-ish potters) and a pair of earrings. Then, since we hadn't eaten in, like, two hours, we had to sit down and enjoy a big, icy lemonade and a small snack of deep fried cheese curds.
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(Dave likes deep fried cheese curds more than I do. These had a kind of sweet batter on them which I didn't think went so well with the salty cheese. That did not keep me from eating my share though, of course.)

Then it was time to hit the road. We were taking the scenic route from Minneapolis to Mankato, then on through New Ulm to Marshall.  When they say "scenic route" in Minnesota, they mean this:
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We saw corn, hundreds of thousands of acres of corn.
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We saw soybeans, hundred of thousands of acres of soybeans.
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We saw hundreds of grain silos of various sizes.

We also went through some disgustingly charming little towns, but I'm kind of over disgustingly charming small towns, so we didn't really stop in any of them unless we needed a toilet.

We did, however, stop in Mankato at a tiny, almost pathologically well-stocked independent CD and record shop called Tune Town. We had neglected to bring any music with us and the local radio stations were uninspired, so we picked up four CDs (they had a "buy three, get one free" deal on their used CDs). I chose a mix CD of bad 80s music and 10,000 Maniacs Unplugged CD. Dave chose a copy of David Byrne's uh-oh and Tom Waits Beautiful Maladies--The Island Years.
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Be sure to drop by Tune Town next time you're in Mankato, Minnesota!
Then we drove on a bit and stopped for a very, very late lunch at a place called Olives.
Olives

 We shared a couple of pizzas, of course, and some very tasty iced tea.
Olives
The woman working solo in the front of the house (there was a cook in the open kitchen) at four in the afternoon was very chatty and told us all about how Mankato was much like Fargo, North Dakota, where she had also lived. She also told us about how she was one of the pioneers of sushi in Mankato, whatever that means.

And here let me just pause to say: I know people make a lot of fuss about Minnesotans being this thing called "Minnesota nice." They seem very nice anyway, and to be fair, it does translate well into service industry types of jobs--I never, ever once ran into a surly minimum-wage slave in Minnesota--but there's something about "Minnesota nice" that I just don't trust.

As we left Mankato, on the way to Marshall (and, for the moment, through Walnut Grove and Tracy), I began to get this dreadful feeling, like, a Children of the Corn kind of feeling about the place.
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The outside of a sod house.
Out on the road, we stopped to look at an exhibit of sod houses--which smell awful inside, in case you don't know--and the feeling just kept growing and growing. It wasn't helped by the mosquito bites I got while we were wandering around. (I'm allergic to mosquitos so the bites swell up and look like I've got golf balls shoved under my skin.)
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The inside of a sod house smells like being buried alive, kinda.
We stopped in Marshall and checked into a newly constructed, cheap-ish hotel (after checking for any reports about it on the online bedbug registry, because apparently Minnesota has a huge bedbug problem). It was a weekday evening and so the place was somewhat distressingly empty, which didn't make me feel any better. It was like the set of a zombie movie before the zombies show up.

We had the leftover pizza from lunch for dinner--or I did anyway--and then I looked out the window at some Canada geese feeding in a field near a pond. We had talked about going to see a movie in the local theater, but we were both a bit too road weary. I was in bed and asleep relatively early.

A few hours later, The Brain woke me up to tell me something. That thing was: These "Minnesota nice" people are the descendents of the people who brought diseases like tuberculosis, cholera, and smallpox that decimated the Indian population. These same people took the Indians that survived and enslaved them or killed outright or simply stole their land and then lobbied to have the remaining Indians segregated onto reservations. These same people stripped away the region's biodiverse native plants and animals to plant acres and acres of monocrops that they cultivate to this day. Are they really "nice" people, these? No.

After The Brain shared that bit of understanding, the weird feelings of dread drained away and I went back to sleep.

Hang on, Minnesota (Day Three) is coming!

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