Finishing up this Minneapolis thing
So, where did I leave off? Oh, yeah. The cool Japanese store.
I’m going to try to stick to the highlights (and quit complaining about wayfinding in Minneapolis) so I can wrap this puppy up and move on to more kid and dog cuteness.
We snuck the husband out of his conference for lunch the next day so that we could go to a restaurant that my Minneapolis-native friend told me about called Hell’s Kitchen (not related to the Hell’s Kitchen TV show, as far as I could tell).
It was in a basement. The walls were painted blood red. The chandelier was made of knives. While it wasn’t Halloween-level kitch, it had a city-Goth-creepy feel to it.
The child didn’t like the creepy feel at all… particularly when the pictures in the bathrooms changed from normal old photos to scary vampire/zombie pictures.
“Mommy, I’m afraid….”
“Oh, don’t be silly child. They’re just pictures. Ohhh! Look. The little girl has vampire teeth!”
Needless to say, there was only one potty break at Hell’s Kitchen.
The food was every bit as good as everyone told me it would be. We had a long list of things we were supposed to try (particularly the Lemon Ricotta hotcakes) but we weren’t in a brunchy sweet mood so we went for the ham-and-pear crisp. It was, basically, a grilled ham sandwich with poached pears in it. Yum. The child poked half-heartedly at her mac-and-cheese and asked if she could draw instead.
“Sure,” I said, pulling a little notebook out of my bag. “Do you have something to draw with?”
She pulled out the glitter body paint pens we bought her at the Guthrie gift shop and waggled them in front of my eyes, an evil grin on her face.
“Oh,” I said, putting the notebook away. I put my arm out to her and said a little prayer that the ink would wash off quickly. “OK. Don’t go nuts.”
She gave me a “bracelet” that actually wasn’t half bad.
Full of ham and pears, we dropped the husband off and the child and I went exploring. We found a neighborhood that looked walkable and wound up at a random elementary school playground. The sun was out (warm, but not uncomfortable) and there was another child playing so we stopped. We ended up staying for over an hour.
I got sunburned. I took a picture of my feet.
The other child got “glitter tattooed” (with her mother’s enthusiastic permission). It was a good afternoon.
The next day brought two big events: the Children’s Museum in St. Paul and the play at the Guthrie. St. Paul was old and charming where Minneapolis was more modern and urban. The Minnesota Children’s Museum was in the center of St. Paul. We parked and walked in.
I have to admit here that my cold was starting to rally against the medications I was taking. I’d be fine one minute and the next minute my sinuses were so clogged that I thought my left eye was going to get pushed out. Then a sneeze would try to dislodge my tonsils… or knock me through a nearby glass window.
Anyway, the museum. It wasn’t as impressive as the Indianapolis museum, but it was very nice. It covered architecture, biology, fluid dynamics, and mechanics.
There was a “town square” exhibit that I guess teaches some level of sociology. The child honed in on the little restaurant.
Yep. That’s my baby… the fry cook.
There was also a nice arts-and-crafts room.
The museum was full of kids so my child no longer needed me to entertain her… which was fine. I just sat in a corner and (discretely) tried to wrap the long, freakishly elastic strings of snot dribbling out of my nose into the half-dozen tissues I had thought to bring with me.
A few friendly women tried to talk to me. I’d smile (feeling my eyeball get pushed out of place by the stuff in my sinuses) and say “I’m-b sorry. I hab a cold.” They’d nod understandingly and pull their hand sanitizer out of their Coach bags as they scooted to the other end of the bench.
Fine with me. I had a tissue emergency on my hands… literally. That meant putting an end to the museum visit.
“But Mooo-ooom. I’m not ready!”
“Sweetheart, we’ve been here for hours. I’m ready to go.”
“We haven’t been here for hours,” she said.
“Yes we have.”
“How many hours?” This is a new debating strategy for her. She gets me wrapped up in proving her wrong and wanders off while I’m gathering my facts.
“I don’t know. Maybe 2 or 3.”
“I think it was 10 minutes.”
“No it wasn’t. We got here at….” I looked up and she was across the room playing at a water table.
*groan*
I argued with her to leave. I argued with her to get out of the crappy gift shop without buying yet another pink stuffed animal with sparkles glued on it. I argued with her about buying a jumbo-sized bag of candy… and then got lost getting back to the hotel.
Not one of our better days.
She was very, very happy to see her father at the hotel. I looked longingly at the hotel bar as I remembered that we still had to get cleaned up and over to the Guthrie for a musical.
Yippee.
So, armed with more cold medicine, we walked over to the Guthrie. The musical (The HMS Pinafore) was a good one for a kid. There was a lot of silly action and minimal romantic crooning. She was up for it… unfortunately, her tiny bladder wasn’t.
“Mom,” she whispered, halfway through the first act. “I gotta go to the bathroom.”
“Can you hold it?”
“I’ll try.”
She squirmed for a few minutes and leaned over again. “I really gotta go.”
I sighed and looked around. We were, naturally, right in the middle of the row. I grabbed her hand and we pushed by about 10 unhappy people and pushed past the surprised ushers chatting outside the door. I’ve been told that I wear a very scary face when I’m in “find a frickin’ bathroom” mode. Based on the looks we got from the ushers, I was pretty sure I was doing it again.
They looked at the child, who was clutching her crotch, and pointed wordlessly toward the escalators.
Mission accomplished, we stand in the back of the theater until intermission.
She is allowed nothing to drink during said intermission.
The trip home the next morning was uneventful, except for the extra time we spent on the airport tran system trying to find the right terminal until a kind person told us we needed be on the other airport tran system. *grumble*
Overall, we’d do it again. Minneapolis was a fun town.
