An exciting day in Minneapolis

My cultural shock is already gone ... I spent a great day in Minneapolis and St. Paul.

I woke up around 8:30 in the morning, yet I could sleep for another hour. Around 10 o'clock David and I were ready for discovering the city.

Boarding the bus we were asking for a day pass ... and you know what ... the bus driver didn't know how to issue a day pass; she told us that she never had done that before. After a call to the transit head office she found a solution and for six bucks we got our 24h pass.

A couple of minutes later we already arrived in downtown. I was pretty excited about all the tall buildings, the business people and in general the nice environment. Really different on how I saw Minneapolis the night before. I took plenty of pictures ... I felt like a countryside guy that spent his first day in a big city (ok I've already been to Paris and London).





Walking through downtown we also discovered the modern light rail of Minneapolis. Yet we decided to first take a bus heading St. Paul.

There we first visited the Capitol ... the Capitol is a building in which are located the court, the house of the senate, the house of representatives, and so on. The building is open to the public and we visited the entire building. The building was actually built after 1900; however, it looks much older (neo classical architecture) ... the building is really beautiful and everything is very well maintained. A must see in St. Paul!!!




Later on, we went to the Museum of History, and we saw exhibitions on the first settlers in Minneapolis, a classical local house and its story and also on the Olympia games of Nazi Germany in 1936. Finally, we visited the Cathedral in St. Paul, which was also built after 1900 and took over 9 years to be completed.



We took the bus back towards downtown ... but we were both hungry and so we decided to skip the Art Museum and enjoyed Mexican food instead. The food was really tasty and much better than the Mexican food I had in Grand Forks. David was also pretty surprised to see lots of his compratiots. In general; a huge part of population is speaking Spanish here.

At night we took the light rail to go to the Mall of America.


There we checked dozens of shops ... and I finally ended with a new belt (of H&M, my favorite store) and a new cool T-Shirt. The mall is supposed to be the biggest one in North America ... it is pretty impressive for it also includes a fun park (including roller coaster, underground aquarium and much more). And according to North American shopping culture the most heard question today was: "How are you doing guys?"




After ice cream at Dairy Queen we decided to get back downtown. On the way to our youth hostel we decided to make a short break at Starbucks (Starbucks is actually as expensive as in Switzerland). Yet, after getting a tea we had a positive surprise ... employees of Starbucks offered us free Sandwiches (the ones they couldn't sell); thus, we will have a free tasty breakfast tomorrow. That was a good experience to end this exciting day (free food for students *smile*).

Tomorrow we will leave Minneapolis for Chicago ... I hope I will be able to update my blog continously (if I will have an internet access). However, I don't know when I will be able to post some pictures.

In terms of cultural shock ... we arrived at night, and I was impressed by the size of the city (and actually it's still a small one ... Chicago, Washington and New York will be much bigger) ... on the other hand, I didn't like the way people talk (they seem to be harsh ... but only for a short snatch) ... the way people don't seem to trust each other and also the kind of ambience (you don't feel too safe at night). However, by taking some precautions I don't see any further problems and I didn't make any bad experiences at all ... it's probably just people and news that scary each other.