After my last post yesterday I went to a panel before heading out to lunch with a group of friends. The panel was to honor a major interpersonal scholar who I had as an instructor during both undergrad and grad school. The presenters on the panel did an excellent job honoring her and each speech was even better than the last! In addition to the great presenters we all received a glass of champagne for a champagne toast at the end.
Afterwards, a group of us met together and headed to Hell’s Kitchen for lunch.
Gordon Ramsey wasn’t there, but the atmosphere was still really cool. The restaurant has many different levels and turns to it and is full of “hellish” like decor. While walking down a staircase to the restaurant one cannot miss a giant butcher knife chandelier hanging overhead.
The place was really neat to say the least! Our food was also excellent. Our table shared an order of cheeseballs before ordering our entrees. They were delicious! The batter was really light and soft (almost funnel cake-y).
For my entree I ordered a ham and pear sandwich (keeping with the pear theme from the night before) with sweet potato fries and basil aoilie (sp) sauce to dip them in. It was very tasty!
After lunch, my co-worker Daniel and I headed to the Mall of America. While traveling there you get to see all of the pretty aspects of downtown Minneapolis. There are sculptures, art design, and landscape design every where you turn. It is really a beautiful downtown area!
The Mall of America is pretty much what you expect. A massive collection of stores and levels of stores, and then they have a small amusement park within the Mall. We had fun just walking around being in awe of it all. We didn’t stay long, and fortunately didn’t spend much, but it was all worth the trip out there anyways! We did hit up a crepe stand before we left. I enjoyed a nutella crepe! It was mighty tasty!
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Once we were back to the hotel we quickly had to change and head back out. A group of us went to the 19 Bar which is the oldest gay bar in Minneapolis. On our walk over the snow really started coming down! The snowflakes were legitimately the size of ping pong balls! It was massive cluster after massive cluster coming down. Truly, it was quite beautiful! It was like we were in a huge snowglobe!
Back to the bar. They have great drink specials and the bar is a nice low-key place to hang out. They have pool tables, dart boards, and the like. With the pitchers being so cheap I’m sure you can expect that we did not lack on the amount of beverages consumed! We had a good size group with us and it was a fun time!
Once we decided to leave the bar we were all starving! The fatty in me smelled BBQ on our walk over to the bar, so I knew there had to be some good BBQ near by! And fortunately it was actually OPEN at the odd hour we went! It was just as delicious as it smelled. We all dived in like nobody’s business when our food arrived! I ordered a pulled pork sandwich. There wasn’t a drop of food on my plate when we were done….
So as you may be able to tell, yesterday was a BIG DAY. Since we have an event this evening I am going to try and keep it a bit more low-key this morning and afternoon. Minneapolis has been great though! I am really enjoying my time here!
Helena on Wheels 