MN Day 3 - Mall of America, Minnehaha, and Mighty Fine Pizza
Since today was the Fourth of July, we decided to visit one of the largest Minnesota landmarks, while also participating in the time honored American tradition of preserving late-stage capitalism, by visiting the Mall of America. Before we got cracking for the day, most of us took the Holiday as an opportunity to sleep in, but my cousin’s John and Kevin got up early and had a fancy brunch at a place called Hell’s Kitchen, a fact that they repeatedly rubbed in everyone’s faces throughout the rest of the week.
We did eventually make our way to the Mall of America which was both hugely impressive and also incredibly overwhelming. The MoA is the largest mall in America, clocking in at four floors and 4,870,000 sq ft (96.4 acres). It was built on the site of the former Metropolitan Stadium where the Minnesota Twins and Vikings used to play until the Twin Cities upgraded to their current Metrodome, but the Mall of America has since ballooned up to the size of roughly seven Yankee Stadiums. As much as you may read (here or elsewhere) about just how huge the mall is, it’s still impossible to capture just how shocking it is to arrive in person and just see it stretch on in every direction. It’s at once enormously impressive that such a building should exist at all, but also a little disheartening to see so much of that monumental space wasted on the same generic retail shops as any other mall. That being said, if you don’t mind the overwhelming by the vast halls of consumerism, the MoA does still offer its fair share of fun and creative diversions, with lots of attractions and quirky local shops nestled amongst the larger titans of industry. Plus it’s where they filmed the big bouncy ball scene in Jingle All the Way in which Arnold Schwatzenegger yells “I’m not a pervert” in the middle of a family Christmas movie, so being on such hallowed pop culture grounds was worth the trip alone.
The first display that tipped us off to this being more than your average mall was this series of incredible Lego sculptures adorning the exterior mall’s Lego store, featuring such strange and wonderful scenes as cavemen fighting off saber-toothed tigers, Theseus doing battle with the minotaur, SWAT Teams descending on motorcycle bandits, massive Transformers standing guard, and Old World explorers pondering a globe. Each sculpture was insane in its own right but seeing all of them side by side was really jawdropping. Plus one of our uncles has believes in a very bizarre conspiracy theory about the Minotaur angering God and causing him to sink Atlantis (it would be hard to explain even if I did understand any of it) so seeing the bull-y boy make an unexpected appearance really cracked us all up. I mean what were the odds?
The other display that really cracked me up was, I believe, intended to be a playful scene advertising Crayola where two prankish crayons spray wax out of a hose onto some other crayons, but, due to several poor design decisions, it really just looks like the Blue Crayon on the right has peed his pants and couldn’t be more thrilled about it. How did presumably so many people not realize this at an stage of the building of this scene?
Probably the most notable non-retail attraction in the Mall though is an entire Nickelodeon-themed Amusement Park sprawling out across the lower floor (did I mention the place is gigantic?). It’s just an explosion of colors and whirring Roller Coasters, which you never expect to see contained inside another building.
Before we could try out the different Nicktoons-inspired rides, we were in need of some refreshments. Luckily, as you might expect, the food court was positively packed with dining options. I went with a chain (albeit one that only just reached MA in the two years since this trip) that my friend Mike from MN would always rave about called Noodles and Company. They had all manner of pasta dishes, but I ultimately went full on comfort food a big plate mac and cheese smothered in BBQ pulled pork. It wasn’t necessarily gourmet but dang was it tasty. And to wash it all down and give me a little energy boost, I got a large iced coffee from Caribou Coffee, a Mid-West chain that saved my bacon more than a few times when no other coffee shops were nearby.
After lunch, we started wandering around the mall and seeing what interesting things we could find. Two highlights from leapt out at me were a full display of delightfully random Conan O’Brien themed superhero merchandise and a bag of certified Crapola!
One of the stores that really stood out to us was a purveyor of decadent home-made chocolates called Northwoods Candy Emporium. Honestly every piece of candy they had on display was basically a miniature work of art, but nothing grabbed my attention quite like those big honking peanut butter cups in the top right corner. It’s super gross that I was still hungry after housing all that mac and cheese and pork, but the chocolate itself was just heavenly.
Next up, we competed against each other in the mall’s Amazing Mirror Maze, a 2,500 sq. ft. hall of mirrors that measures up as one of the largest mirror mazes in the world. It was a fun and dizzying endeavor that was at once very campy with its neon colors and the kind of carpeting that was really popular at laser tag sites in the late 90s/early 2000s while also being devilishly difficult despite its playful aesthetics.
Somehow I managed to finish first, but I quickly realized that it was almost certainly because my cousins had all found each other and were actually enjoying themselves instead of rushing to win so I actually ran back into find them just for the heck of it. Plus, I had to find some other people just to confirm that they were actually playing a strange 80s synth cover of Puttin’ On the Ritz and I wasn’t just going crazy. It turns out it was a real song, that I guess was quite popular in Germany at one point. Just imagine hearing this while trapped in a maze of endless reflections, it was really like an out of body experience.
apparently Taco is actually his birthname, wild
After making our way free of the thankfully Minotaur-less labyrinth, we calmed our nerves at a store called Vom Fass which specialized in fancy olive oils, vinegars, wines, and spirits. Most importantly, everything was sample-able so you could have quite a time tasting thimblefuls of the finest oils and booze from around the world. My lingering Catholic guilt (and presumably their business model) kicked in and after quite a few samples I did feel like I had to buy something so I bought a bottle of the wonderfully named Hoodoo Dubbel, a strong, aged Belgian ale from Minnesota’s own Boom Island Brewing Company. Plus my sister got this great photo of this insane slogan from one of the cheese manufacturers they had stocked so it was pretty successful stop.
Along the way up to this point, we had managed to get separated so before we went to the theme park we decided to reconvene and figured that there couldn’t be a better meeting point than in front of giant painting of Big Foot. While we waited, my cousins Katie and Kevin had quite the photo shoot with the Sasquatch:
We did eventually reconvene and manage to all go to Nickelodeon Universe. While we all grew up loving Nicktoons, most of us felt either too old or too tired to go all out on the rides (even though they did look quite fun). We played it safe and instead of buying an unlimited pass, we all just picked one or two things we really wanted to see and called it an early day. The rides I went on were the Log Chute (a classic log flume type ride with a surprise giant Paul Bunyan statue at the end for some mid-west flair) and a ride called Ghost Blasters which was like a combination of laser tag and the silly animatronic haunted house rides where you could compete to shoot as many of the ghosts inside as possible. We picked this last one because it was one of the cheapest rides, but it ended up being a blast partly because we went on with some younger kids who were super into it so naturally we had to match their energy level. It was also just fun to walk around and see all the wild Nickelodeon decor, and we even got to take in a free live show of guests playing some classic Double Dare challenges.
Somehow even after all my snacking, I saw that my cousin Kevin had found a place that sold macarons, called Macarons by Maddie Lu and I obviously had to get their cookie dough flavored Cookie Monster macaron. My Cookie Monster may have looked like he was just hit rock bottom after a huge cookie binge, but in general their colors and confectionary artistry were so cute and vibrant that it would have been hard not to love the place even before getting to taste anything. Luckily the flavors backed up the big game their aesthetics were walking and it was a great final stop to the outing.
While I’ve been writing this post and the others for this week, I asked my sister and cousins if they had any good photos to share from the trip, and it turns out that at some point while we were separated Lauren and Katie really took full advantage of a unicorn photo opportunity station. Enjoy:
After spending the first half of the day mallrat-ing it up, I think we all needed a change of pace so our next play was to take advantage of the lovely July day and take in some natural splendor at Minneapolis’ Minnehaha Park. The park lies along Minnehaha Creek which links Lake Minnetonka (one of the 10,000 lakes that Minneapolis is the land of) to the Mississippi river. Between the rushing, crystalline waters and verdant greens, the park was just jam packed with stunning vistas, and it was pretty rejuvenating to be out and about on such a lovely summer’s day.
We even made a new friend in the form of this very grumpy looking crane:
The biggest draw to the park though is its famous Minnehaha Falls, an astounding natural waterfall that went 19th-century-viral after a daguerreotype of its torrential downpour became a hot commodity to circulate. The early photograph caught the eye of a certain Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and he immortalized it forever in his epic poem, The Song of Hiawatha, which was a smash hit with the public at the time of its publication despite a scathing review by the New York Times who thought Longfellow had some real nerve portraying Native Americans in a positive light. The poem may not have aged perfectly (though it does have a lovely rhythm to it), but good lord is that New York Times review genuinely shocking by modern standards (and frankly it must have seemed extreme even at the time) saying that the poem was too concerned with the “the monstrous traditions of an uninteresting, and, one may almost say, a justly exterminated race.” Jesus, it’s insane that people could just casually justify genocide in poetry reviews, but so it goes. Luckily, people who weren’t racist poetry critics were enchanted by the poem and it helped turn the Falls into a big tourist destination which would eventually help guarantee the park’s preservation by the National Parks Service for all of us to be equally wowed by it today as people were 200 years ago.
My favorite thing I learned about the Falls though has to be that nearly every year it gets cold enough in Minneapolis that the water actually freezes mid-cascade into one big slab of ice. While it was far too summary for us to get to witness this, luckily the internet hath provided some truly breathtaking photos people have taken from behind the frozen falls.
While we were walking back from the Falls to our cars, we also noticed this bust of the Mdewakanton Dakota chief Little Crow by the artist Ed Archie Noisecat which is intended as a loving tribute to an impressive leader, but if you don’t expect to see a giant disembodied head in the woods it might just scare the hell out of you like it did for us.
On the drive back from the park, my sister and I listened to an episode of a podcast she really likes called Disgraceland about crazy rock and roll related true crime stories. She was excited to share an episode about Keith Richard’s getting arrested for having enough heroin in his hotel room to be arrested for intent to traffic. The kicker that made it extra salacious though was that the real reason the Canadian government decided to take the crime so seriously was because Mick Jagger was having an affair with none of the the prime minister’s wife (and mother of the current prime minister) Margaret Trudeau. It’s always crazy to me that early rock stars really did basically live like Greek Gods.
For dinner we got pizza at an excellently named restaurant called Fat Lorenzo’s. Between the name and the beautifully surreal imagery of floating people filling an ancient Roman temple with giant pizza toppings on the wall facing the parking lot, I knew I was going to love the place.
The pizza was fantastic and managed to live up to the kind of quality you would expect from a fat lorenzo. You could also get slices which made it much easier for everyone in a large group like ours to get exactly what they wanted. I went with a slice of their signature Fat’s slice which came with pepperoni, Italian sausage, mushroom, green pepper, and olives and, for variety, a slice of their Alfredo which came with Alfredo sauce, chicken, artichokes, roasted red peppers, spinach, ricotta, mozzarella and provolone. Both were great (and huge!) so lovers of white and red pizzas will not be disappointed. Personally, I might give the edge to the Fat’s but I’m also not sure I could eat more than one slice at a time without instantly giving my self a heart attack.
After dinner, we all just hung out at the Air BnB since there wasn’t any comedy happening with the holiday. I got to try out the fancy beer I bought at the Mall of America, and naturally Mimosas were made as is customary when we all get together, and we all watched an insane documentary called The Institute about a group of sweet nerds in San Francisco who wanted to create a live action role-playing game where people would get inducted into the fictional “Jejune Institute” and complete silly tasks all around the city. It was supposed to be a lark, but naturally the line between reality and fantasy got blurred and some people took the game way too seriously leading to the Institute’s eventual official disbanding 3 years later (though some people still think it was all real). It was a roller coaster of a movie, and also felt like the kind of thing my cousin Katie might have tried to convince her friends to do in college.
All in all not a bad to spend an Independence Day, cheers!
this was actually from earlier in the week, but mimosas were a staple of our time together
Favorite Random Sightings: “Skincare gone wild!” (yikes); a maternity shop called Pea In the Pod; a fancy water with the crazy slogan “The Soft taste of Solid Rock”; a horrendously named furniture store called Lovesac; a Little kid wearing a t-shirt that just said "seriously handsome”
Regional Observations: I think movies like Fargo give people who aren’t from there an impression of the mid-West being really cold, but in the summer months I think I had some of the most beautiful weather of my whole trip in Minnesota.
Music Listened To: I stopped listening to all the albums on my iPod in order while my cousins were around so I could play whatever they were feeling like, and I remember my cousin Kevin really wanting to listen to some Ween because we’d both gotten really into them over this year
Joke of the Day:
Tom is applying for a job as a signalman for the local railroad and is told to meet the inspector at the signal box.
The inspector decides to give Tom a pop quiz, asking: "What would you do if you realized that two trains were heading towards each other on the same track?"
Tom says: "I would switch one train to another track."
"What if the lever broke?" asks the inspector.
"Then I'd run down to the tracks and use the manual lever down there," answers Tom.
"What if that had been struck by lightning?" challenges the inspector.
"Then," Tom continued, "I'd run back up here and use the phone to call the next signal box."
"What if the phone was busy?"
"In that case," Tom argued, "I'd run to the street level and use the public phone near the station."
"What if that had been vandalized?"
"Oh well," said Tom, "in that case I would run into town and get my Uncle Leo.
This puzzled the inspector, so he asked "Why would you do that?"
"Because he's never seen a train crash."
Songs of the Day:
70’s prog-rock musicianship with 90’s slacker aesthetics
my personal favorite version of the song
Bonus: The Conan Clip that apparently inspired all the strange merchandise at the Mall-