Various Flights of Fancy (Minneapolis Edition)

Dave and I are back from our little jaunt to Minneapolis. We arrived home yesterday afternoon, as a matter of fact.

On this trip, we decided to bite the bullet and pay for first class tickets for our flight there and back. The difference between flying first class and flying coach is pretty extreme from start to finish, let me tell you. I mean, we got to skip to the front of the massive security lines in Minneapolis, we boarded first, our seats were spacious (6'4" Dave had tons of space between his knees and the next seat!), we were given numerous drinks and snacks and fed lunch on a two hour flight, and so on. It's great pretending to be rich because as it turns out, you can buy your way out of all the inconveniences that the great unwashed hoards are told are the necessary evils of modern air travel.

So it was quite a comfortable journey--I mean, aside from the monstrous panic attack--I'm having a heart attack, I'm dying, I've got to get off this plane--I had in the tiny airplane bathroom before our flight took off. That was no fun.

Anyway, I made it. We arrived in Minneapolis on Thursday late afternoon, picked up our rental car, checked into our hotel (in Eden Prarie, about thirty minutes outside of Minneapolis), and drove back into the city to have dinner at a place called Himalayan Restaurant (an okay, not great place; recommended by one of Dave's Minneapolis-based co-workers).

Samosas! (And wo, aloo cauli, tofu thukpa, rice, and nan.)

After dinner, we stopped by the grocery store on the way back to the hotel to pick up some bottled water, fruit, and yogurt for the morning (we tend to sleep in and miss the hotel breakfast). Then we crashed.

Friday, we slept in a bit, got up and decided to go into the city via the scenic route. On the way out, we stopped for a coffee at the local beloved Caribou Coffee chain and I ordered my usual drink (decaf soy latte) and received some bit of entirely undrinkable horribleness in a cup. So when we got to the city we stopped by another cafe, Mon Petit Cherie, and I tried again. This time I got something drinkable (yay!), and we celebrated drinkable coffee by sharing a couple of pastries as well.

Success!

After our bit of refreshment, we went to the Northern Clay Center and checked out the galleries there.

The young man working in the gallery was very friendly. He gave us access to their storeroom where there was more work for sale, then bade us look in all the cabinets out in the gallery which contained even more work. We came away with several pieces of wood-fired pottery.

Northern Clay Center also has a permanent gallery space devoted to more expensive "art" pieces, and the current show is called Florilegium.

 Included were several amazing pieces by Kate Maury.

After our little pottery shopping spree, we had a very early lunch at Pizzeria Lola. I love this restaurant. It's owned and operated by a Korean immigrant who named the place after her Weimaraner, Lola, and they have some of the best pizza I've ever had. They get really crowded for lunch, so we arrived just after they opened so we wouldn't have to wait for a table.

We shared a starter of cauliflower roasted in their wood-fired pizza oven with lemon and Calabrian chili.

 Then we had a pizza called "The Boise" with potato, gruyere, fontina, caramelized onion, olive oil, and rosemary.

Look at that! YUM!

They serve their pizza on all these crazy plates, like the kind that grandmas keep in their china cabinets and never touch.

There are fresh flowers on the tables and interesting advice in the bathroom:

After lunch, we were both ready for a nap, so we drove back to the hotel in Eden Prarie and did just that. We slept for a couple of hours, then hopped back into the car and headed out again for an early dinner before the concert.

Dave has a favorite Nepalese (and Tibetan and Indian) restaurant in St. Paul, Everest on Grand so we stopped there and had a quick order of samosa chaat, matar paneer, kauli, rice and nan.

This crazy thing is the samosa chaat. It's a samosa smashed and topped with diced onion, tomato, yogurt, potato noodles (sev), tamarind and mint sauces, and chat masala. It looks horrible and tastes amazing.

So delicious!

But then it was time for the concert.

The venue, the Orpheum Theater, is in downtown Minneapolis. It's a beautiful theater inside and out, originally built in the 1920s, and owned for a time by Bob Dylan.

I'm such a nerd and a longtime early bird that Dave and I were the first people in the theater. (I can't help it. It's a sickness. You should feel sorry for me.)

Look at those seats? Beautiful and torturous. We made up for not flying coach by enduring three and a half hours crammed into those awful seats.

Eugene Mirman, a stand-up comedian who also voices Eugene on Bob's Burgers, opened the show. He had a bit that I loved about trying to think up things to yell at his wife in public to make people think she was crazy. His best one was yelling at her from down the aisle in a grocery store, "I don't care what you say! I'm buying toilet paper! It is not a waste of money!"

And then there were these guys:

Well, this is half of these guys.

The Jemaine Clement half of Flight of the Conchords, from New Zealand, who bill themselves as a "folk parody band." The other half of the duo is Brett McKenzie, he of the Oscar-winning Muppet Movie song, "Man or Muppet." We were really in Minneapolis to see them perform. Which they did, including a brief purplish Purple Rain tribute to Prince (this was Minneapolis, after all).

Most people have never heard of them, even though they sold out thirty or so venues of this size or larger for their summer tour. Here's a bit of what they do from a show recorded in 2009 (a song they performed as an encore at the concert, actually):

After the concert since we are getting old, instead of going out drinking we went back to the hotel and got into our pajamas and went straight to bed. Yawn!

Saturday was devoted to pottery and a museum. After a hotel breakfast, our first stop was a gallery called The Grand Hand. We picked up several pieces of wood-fired pottery (seemed to be our theme this trip) and I bought a scarf that was made in Brooklyn, a huge, gauzy, pale blue-gray scarf with industrial black printing scattered around.

Then we broke for an early lunch at--yes--Pizzeria Lola.

Where we had our favorite roasted cauliflower and a new kind of pizza, The Sunnyside, with Red Table guanciale, pecorino, cream, leeks and two organic eggs sunnyside up on top.

Delicious!

Then to try to keep our cheesy, sludgy blood moving, we went to the Weisman Art Museum on the University of Minnesota campus. This place! The building. My god.

 Look at it! It was designed by Frank Gehry--this side an abstract representation of a waterfall and a fish--and built in 1993. And inside, there is art. A bunch of awesome art, including lots of pottery like this piece by Jun Kaneko, a Japanese-born artist who lives and works in Nebraska now.

These hand-built ceramic pieces are a marvel. That photo doesn't really give you the scale, so here it is again with Dave standing near it.

It weighs over 1000 pounds and he builds them (well, his minions build them anyway) inside a room sized kiln. Then they're fired for six weeks. Six weeks! (Our tiny kiln fires for six hours.) Apparently, only 2-3 survive out of each production run of ten pieces. Crazy.

But there was lots of art. Like this amazing installation called 'The Pedicord Apts.,'' by Ed Kienholz and Nancy Reddin Kienholz

You walk down the hallway of this strange installation and you can listen at each doorway at what's going on inside each apartment. A 1998 article in the New York Times ("One Step Back; Museum-Quality Seediness Alive in the Ordinary") describes it perfectly.

Nothing like an old school selfie inside an art installation.

After the museum, we were both hot and tired and ready for a bit of downtime, so we headed back to the hotel. Dinner was a repeat of the night before at Everest on Grand. And that was our Saturday.

Sunday was a travel day. We left the hotel by 8:00 a.m. and had to do all the boring travel day things (gas up and return the rental car, check in for our flight, check our bags, and on and on). We had a couple of hours to kill in the airport, so we did a bit of shopping and then had lunch (we didn't know that we were getting lunch on the plane what with our first class tickets). Part of our lunch was from the airport Burger King, a place I haven't eaten at in 20 years or more. But turns out they have a quite tasty veggie burger!

Yum?

And then we were home. This morning I got up and, without the benefit of a single minute of study (and without having attended a single lecture since the last exam because I was sick with this respiratory virus), I walked into my anatomy and physiology class and took the second exam of this semester. I thought it was going to be a disaster, but I got a B. A low B, but still.

Anyway, there are still pottery photos to come. (We haven't unpacked our new pottery yet.)