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I spent the day around Minneapolis. I stopped in to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. There were a lot of interesting pieces, but I particularly enjoyed the temporary exhibition about photographic panoramas (a form that I haven't really appreciated in the past) and the room focusing on the Prairie School of architecture and decoration. I thought I was neat that one of the "pieces" was a window facing the downtown Minneapolis skyline, with tags for each of the buildings.
My other stop was the Mall of America, which was impressive in a very different way. I'm not sure what I pictured the Mall would be like, but I was surprised at how elaborate the storefronts were. There were things like animatronic animals (Rainforest Cafe), large tiki sculptures (Kokomo), and two-story tall mecha built of Lego bricks (the Lego store, naturally). There was also a huge scrapbooking convention going on, with booths spread throughout the Mall, and what looked like live competitions where a leader was calling out elements to include and dozens of women were scrambling to cut-and-paste appropriately.
I had no idea that there was an amusement park in the middle of the Mall. Julee met up with me there after her shift at the hospital was over and we went on the Fairly Oddparents Roller Coaster. The coaster was kind of small, and didn't have huge drops, but it made up for it by having the car rotate around an axis perpendicular to the track, which left me properly dizzy after just a few twists.
I had a delicious home-cooked Korean dinner at Julee's parents' house and talked with them a lot about travel. They're seasoned world travelers, so we had lots of stories to swap.
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