back on october 2nd masha drove us – admirable: me, being sick and apparently at some point becoming cranky (sorry about that again!), grandma and our crazy two year old baby who mastered this tricky adventure in a great way but still is two and crazy, you can vividly imagine this fellowship – from kansas to minnesota, crossing missouri and iowa. we arrived in minneapolis/st. paul round eleven p.m. and stayed with friends of masha, vicky and heinz, who were very dear and kind and made us feel very comfortable right from the very first second.when masha drove us around for a first tour of the city in broad daylight the next day my first impression of minneapolis was: wow, now that’s one of the ugliest places i’ve ever seen.
interesting, isn’t it, how quickly things can change and how nothing ever is what it seems to be? because i fell in love with this city. but let’s keep some chronological order here – that saturday i went over to brett’s place where i would spend another week (instead of three days as i had initially planned). that night we went to a spoken word (for germans: poetry slam without the slamming part) show that also had hip hop performances. the show was organized in memory of fong lee, who was shot by the mpls. police two years ago.
both the spoken word contributions and the music were awesome and we had a lot of fun there. i also got to meet another comrade, dan, who was not extremely talkative that day – but still, it’s always nice to meet people who dislike and distrust capitalism in the same way i do…
anyway: the next day, sunday obviously, we made use of the fact that brett did not have to work and went out to the mill city area, being an old watermill ruin that is somewhat natural and wild but still has this industrial charm to it.
that was probably the moment minneapolis and i started flirting, i think, the city asked me out on a very intense date that day.
we had lunch at a place called the spaghetti factory and then finished watching minority report which we had started watching the day before. we came to the conclusion that tom cruise has got exactly two facial expressions (stoic and yelling) which probably would have made it impossible for him to become a successful actor without scientological help.
we probably watched some more stuff – family guy or whatever, and i believe, brett made me watch the vikings vs. someone football game for at least 15 minutes – or was that another day? might very well be.
on monday i went uptown and walked around half of the day.
i got soaked three times, but i had loads of fun checking out the area, ending up walking around at the lake calhoun and lake of the isles area, taking about a trillion pictures – i’ve found out a lot about the settings of my camera this week, you wouldn’t believe, especially when taking the fact into account that i’ve had it for about one and a half years…. now i know how to get rid of that wide angle if i want to and how the focal width works and i’ve even learned some english photography terminology, yay! – so, anyway, i took lots and lots of pics and walked through the rain and obviously my kidneys weren’t all that happy about that, but i had a fun time and that’s all that counts in the end, right...
waiting for the rain to stop or at least slow down a little bit:
i think that night we got asian food, which we did a lot actually, watched something – something – maybe football or… whatever – and hung out. in fact, hanging out and relaxing is something i really learned to appreciate while being here in the states, i guess i don’t really do that too often when i’m at home.
on tuesday it rained throughout the whole day so we stayed in and watched some more tom cruise (the last samurai – tom cruise is the last samurai, great joke, isn’t it…? nice landscape though), some dave chapelle show, some family guy, and then we went to a branch meeting watching rethink Afghanistan, a documentary about the us intervention in afghanistan: all of you have probably by now heard about obama’s peace nobel prize, trust me, after watching this movie it becomes even more of a farce than it was in the first place.
i had bought a train ticket (yes, there are trains in the us! not very many, but at least they connect the largest places in the north and i guess around the coast areas, west and east) to go to chicago the next day. however, my affection for minneapolis, that had manifested by then, and the fact that i had way too much fun hanging out with brett to move on the next day led to the decision of just simply not going.
i stayed through sunday, missing out the chance of going by a cheap train ticket but instead having loads and loads and loads of fun, an awesome time relaxing and hanging out, getting to know some more comrades, being extremely well taken care of by brett and finding inspiration and new ideas and maybe even some new drive towards artistic as well as political work in minneapolis. i love this place.
however, wednesday and thursday turned out to be rather introverted days for me, i stayed in most the time and worked ( or rather: avoided working) on my leadoff for a branch meeting on thursday which i for some reason had promised to give (german stuff: history of the welfare state shredding, perspectives, development of die linke, youth stuff, far right development, you know the kind: a short history of everything in twenty minutes) – but things went better than expected – and on friday i finally went to see the minneapolis institute of arts to find some inspiration and to take another, well, maybe this time it was only a billion, pictures.
me and mia:
(i apologize for the fact that all pics of me look somewhat the same - it's just a simple fact that most of the time i take them myself and they tend to depend on the length of my arms which does not seem to alter to a great extent.)
i ended up going downtown hopeful to make it down to mississippi river but that didn’t quite work out and i got lost – only once, yay! – walked around for a while, sent a couple of postcards and went back home.
downtown:
that night we hung out with comrade ryan and i had my first back to business – out of meds-beer, that was fun.
saturday was fairly relaxed, we got brett a new fancy camera which is a model close to mine and which i have learnt a few things from, interestingly enough, and later on we went to khans mongolian barbecue, having asian food for the third time that week – it was great asian food, so definitely no complaints on that one, especially because the place was cool. you basically throw whatever you want to have fried altogether in one bowl and put some sauces over it and you hand the whole thing over to the cook who would then fry it for you. the place itself seems to be somewhat outside town, but i can never tell here. it is half fancy with those cool tables and the whole idea of having your asian crab-salmon-shrimp food with customized veggies (that’s what i did, yum) personally fried for you, and half homey-cosy-comfy.
fancy table:
fancy chopstick-technique:
so, after all: what is it that i love so much about minneapolis?
i love that it’s got those tall downtown glass buildings along with old churches right next to them, that it’s green and has all these lakes (“minneapolis, city of the thousand lakes”), the mill city area, the many many trees that will turn all pretty orange and red in a few weeks, days maybe, while it’s got this industrial charm. i love, that it is a crazy, liberal and fun place, that it is somewhat calm while it still has a real city feel to it – something bremen is lacking more or less – i love that there are places that make good coffee, that they have snow and real winters and summers, that it’s very earthbound while still somewhat freaky. people here are not as easy to approach as in the south, yes, i admit that. but then again – the admission to the arts museum is free. and there’s public transportation, at least they have buses and a light rail which is somewhat between a tram and an s-bahn.
minneapolis is awesome.
before i leave you with a couple more impressions i'd once again like to thank masha for driving and keeping spirits up and brett for making my life absolutely carefree and more than enjoyable this week - thank you!
interesting, isn’t it, how quickly things can change and how nothing ever is what it seems to be? because i fell in love with this city. but let’s keep some chronological order here – that saturday i went over to brett’s place where i would spend another week (instead of three days as i had initially planned). that night we went to a spoken word (for germans: poetry slam without the slamming part) show that also had hip hop performances. the show was organized in memory of fong lee, who was shot by the mpls. police two years ago.
both the spoken word contributions and the music were awesome and we had a lot of fun there. i also got to meet another comrade, dan, who was not extremely talkative that day – but still, it’s always nice to meet people who dislike and distrust capitalism in the same way i do…
anyway: the next day, sunday obviously, we made use of the fact that brett did not have to work and went out to the mill city area, being an old watermill ruin that is somewhat natural and wild but still has this industrial charm to it.
that was probably the moment minneapolis and i started flirting, i think, the city asked me out on a very intense date that day.
we had lunch at a place called the spaghetti factory and then finished watching minority report which we had started watching the day before. we came to the conclusion that tom cruise has got exactly two facial expressions (stoic and yelling) which probably would have made it impossible for him to become a successful actor without scientological help.
we probably watched some more stuff – family guy or whatever, and i believe, brett made me watch the vikings vs. someone football game for at least 15 minutes – or was that another day? might very well be.
on monday i went uptown and walked around half of the day.
i got soaked three times, but i had loads of fun checking out the area, ending up walking around at the lake calhoun and lake of the isles area, taking about a trillion pictures – i’ve found out a lot about the settings of my camera this week, you wouldn’t believe, especially when taking the fact into account that i’ve had it for about one and a half years…. now i know how to get rid of that wide angle if i want to and how the focal width works and i’ve even learned some english photography terminology, yay! – so, anyway, i took lots and lots of pics and walked through the rain and obviously my kidneys weren’t all that happy about that, but i had a fun time and that’s all that counts in the end, right...
waiting for the rain to stop or at least slow down a little bit:
i think that night we got asian food, which we did a lot actually, watched something – something – maybe football or… whatever – and hung out. in fact, hanging out and relaxing is something i really learned to appreciate while being here in the states, i guess i don’t really do that too often when i’m at home.
on tuesday it rained throughout the whole day so we stayed in and watched some more tom cruise (the last samurai – tom cruise is the last samurai, great joke, isn’t it…? nice landscape though), some dave chapelle show, some family guy, and then we went to a branch meeting watching rethink Afghanistan, a documentary about the us intervention in afghanistan: all of you have probably by now heard about obama’s peace nobel prize, trust me, after watching this movie it becomes even more of a farce than it was in the first place.
i had bought a train ticket (yes, there are trains in the us! not very many, but at least they connect the largest places in the north and i guess around the coast areas, west and east) to go to chicago the next day. however, my affection for minneapolis, that had manifested by then, and the fact that i had way too much fun hanging out with brett to move on the next day led to the decision of just simply not going.
i stayed through sunday, missing out the chance of going by a cheap train ticket but instead having loads and loads and loads of fun, an awesome time relaxing and hanging out, getting to know some more comrades, being extremely well taken care of by brett and finding inspiration and new ideas and maybe even some new drive towards artistic as well as political work in minneapolis. i love this place.
however, wednesday and thursday turned out to be rather introverted days for me, i stayed in most the time and worked ( or rather: avoided working) on my leadoff for a branch meeting on thursday which i for some reason had promised to give (german stuff: history of the welfare state shredding, perspectives, development of die linke, youth stuff, far right development, you know the kind: a short history of everything in twenty minutes) – but things went better than expected – and on friday i finally went to see the minneapolis institute of arts to find some inspiration and to take another, well, maybe this time it was only a billion, pictures.
me and mia:
(i apologize for the fact that all pics of me look somewhat the same - it's just a simple fact that most of the time i take them myself and they tend to depend on the length of my arms which does not seem to alter to a great extent.)
i ended up going downtown hopeful to make it down to mississippi river but that didn’t quite work out and i got lost – only once, yay! – walked around for a while, sent a couple of postcards and went back home.
downtown:
that night we hung out with comrade ryan and i had my first back to business – out of meds-beer, that was fun.
saturday was fairly relaxed, we got brett a new fancy camera which is a model close to mine and which i have learnt a few things from, interestingly enough, and later on we went to khans mongolian barbecue, having asian food for the third time that week – it was great asian food, so definitely no complaints on that one, especially because the place was cool. you basically throw whatever you want to have fried altogether in one bowl and put some sauces over it and you hand the whole thing over to the cook who would then fry it for you. the place itself seems to be somewhat outside town, but i can never tell here. it is half fancy with those cool tables and the whole idea of having your asian crab-salmon-shrimp food with customized veggies (that’s what i did, yum) personally fried for you, and half homey-cosy-comfy.
fancy table:
fancy chopstick-technique:
so, after all: what is it that i love so much about minneapolis?
i love that it’s got those tall downtown glass buildings along with old churches right next to them, that it’s green and has all these lakes (“minneapolis, city of the thousand lakes”), the mill city area, the many many trees that will turn all pretty orange and red in a few weeks, days maybe, while it’s got this industrial charm. i love, that it is a crazy, liberal and fun place, that it is somewhat calm while it still has a real city feel to it – something bremen is lacking more or less – i love that there are places that make good coffee, that they have snow and real winters and summers, that it’s very earthbound while still somewhat freaky. people here are not as easy to approach as in the south, yes, i admit that. but then again – the admission to the arts museum is free. and there’s public transportation, at least they have buses and a light rail which is somewhat between a tram and an s-bahn.
minneapolis is awesome.
before i leave you with a couple more impressions i'd once again like to thank masha for driving and keeping spirits up and brett for making my life absolutely carefree and more than enjoyable this week - thank you!
Anuta, I'm so glad to hear that you liked MPLS as much as I do. You went to all the places I used to spend a lot of time at!! I wish we could have done it together, I would shown you a couple of other great things about the city.
AntwortenLöschenI love you, and miss you. Sasha keeps saying: Anuta!!
We miss you, babe!!