Return from Minnesota
I just returned, very late last night, from a 4-day jaunt to the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota.
And by "jaunt", I of course mean 4-day business trip to teach classes at the annual Archiver's Scrapfest convention for crazed and curious scrapbookers all over the country. Archiver's already took down the information from their website, so I guess you'll have to wait anxiously until next summer to read more details about the event. Or maybe I'll get around to posting them here.
I'm still waking up a little and need to go into work, where I damn well better get some comp time. I stayed until after 7pm finishing stuff at work on Wednesday that had to be done before I left. I woke up at 5:00am on Thusday to catch my flight out, and Ben picked me up from the airport last night (he also drive me on Thursday, what a champ) and I walked in the door at 1am. Now it's Monday again. Bleh.
The highlight of my daily morning mall experience was Caribou Coffee. I was first introduced to the awesome Starbucks Alternative of the North when Liz, Becki W. and I drove to Toronto on Spring Break many years ago, when I wasn't quite 21 and could drink at the bars in Ontario and at the Second City theater, and where we perfected our Ontarionian dialect (i.e. the difference between American dollars and Canadian "DOLE-ers").
Otherwise, the mall was just a super-sized mall. With locals speaking in the adorable Minnesotan-close-to-Ontario-dialect. With a little amusement park in the center and lots of nice places to eat, like the Twin City Grill, a Ruby Tuesday that was under construction and where the poor waitress took 20 minutes to figure out which of the three total items we ordered belonged on which credit card, P.B. Loco with lots of really weird and somewhat delicious Peanut Butter creations, the Magic Pan Crepe Stand with fabulous French Crepes made by authentic Hispanic employees, and tons of Fast Food options of which we tried on Thai place that served the blandest Thai food ever. And that was my culinary experience at MoA.
I also went shopping during some down time, and found a couple of cool things at Nordstrom Rack (to my surprise, because I really didn't feel like shopping when my coworker and I first went in) and some other stores. For the most part, they were the same stores you find everywhere else at every other mall, and I think I satisfied my need to ever visit the Mall of America again. Ben was happy to hear that. I never really had an urge to go there in the first place, but whatever. Who knows, I might even end up going back to teach classes again next year.
One really great thing that came out of the trip was getting to know my coworker. She just started in the Sales department as a Sales Assistant about a month ago, and I work in Marketing, so we hadn't really talked much before. We had to share a hotel room (luckily we each had our own bed) and we got along very well. Hopefully we'll even hang out for non-work-related purposes in the future.
