See! This IS a travel blog.

Minneapolis part one.

Minneapolis has never been in my top ten must-see destinations. I’ve never longed to wander the streets of its famous…mall? I’ve never thought, “that would be a nice place for a honeymoon.” I’ve never looked out the window in October and thought wistfully, “I bet Minnesota is lovely and chilly at this time of year. “ All I knew about Minneapolis is that it is somewhere north of Siberia, and I sort of got deported from there once.

So when we set off for a conference, sarcastic remarks abounded.

As I got in the car to the airport:

“We’re going to Disneyland! Oh wait.”

As we alighted from the plane.

“I’ve ALWAYS wanted to go to Minneapolis.”
“Yeah, I remember you talking about it…that one time.”

And then, at the hotel…

When you’re attending an anti-tobacco conference, guess what might be an important requirement for your hotel room. Go on, take a guess. I’ll give you a hint. You can SMOKE tobacco.

That’s right, we like our hotel rooms to be nonsmoking. That’s putting it mildly. Telling us that you’re giving us a smoking room is like a red rag to a bull. It’s like telling a kosher Jew that he’ll be sleeping in the pigsty tonight, hope that’s all right sir. It is most certainly not all right.

Evil hotel clerk insisted that our travel agent had requested it. Nice hotel clerk whispered behind his hand that that was not quite true – apparently Best Western does this all the time. Anyway, Nice Hotel Clerk ended up putting my co-worker R and I in a smoke free suite, which worked out quite nicely.

And look! Sunshine! See, Minneapolis isn’t all bad.






And Minneapolitans (excepting Evil Hotel Clerk) are lovely.

F’rinstance.
We arranged to meet the rest of our group at a sushi restaurant after we picked up our registration materials. We walked and walked and walked like determined pioneers, and came to where I thought we must be within a block of the restaurant for which we sought. (Origami).

We found instead another restaurant, where a nice man told us that ours was back in the direction we’d come from.

We had the barman call us a cab. And waited and waited like very patient pioneers.
The barman called again, and we chatted to Nice Man about the history of Minneapolis, e.g. the Guthrie next door, The Mills (next the other door), (did you know that Minn. is the home of Pilsbury?), and the warehouse district. (where they kept the flour etc that they milled, and where our restaurant was).

Then the hostess (we were getting to know several people in the bar by this time) called us – she’d been looking out for the cab while having a cig. But yet another cab sailed by, like a Cardine bus.

Then Nice Man came out again. “There’s my Volvo. I can take you there, be about 5 minutes out of my way, and come back and eat my dessert.
After a couple of '“no” “I insist"s', we hopped in and he delivered us to our restaurant, where our friends were starting to get worried and send us concerned texts.

And the sushi was soooo good. A couple of our party hadn’t tried sashimi before, and it was fun to introduce them to its fresh beauty.