It’s the morning of my third day here, and my host/friend and I are taking it slooow. Thought we would go to the Consulate so I could vote in the Norwegian election today, but the cars are both taken, so it’ll have to be another day. Instead I’ll take this chance to write about some of my first impressions of Minnesota!
Cars. I knew, but I didn’t know, how hard it is to go anywhere without a car. Well, no, maybe not in Minneapolis. I’m in Eden Prairie at the moment, which feels like a suburb to Minneapolis, and it is, but it’s also a city in its own right. Driving from here to Minneapolis to the Minneapolis city center takes around 25 minutes. Taking the bus takes more than an hour, according to Google Maps, and my host/friend doesn’t even believe that bus exists. So I don’t know. I don’t have a car. I don’t even have a liscence! (my greatest shame). Grocery stores are much rarer to come by in the city than back home. I also need to get all my stuff to my long-term apartment, as well as a bed and perhaps more furniture too. HMM… I had a wee panic about this the other night. Luckily I have a couple of weeks to figure it out. We’ll see how it goes.
Eden Prairie. It’s so gorgeous here. Very Wisteria Lane. Host/friend thinks I’m ridicilous for wow-ing at everything. I thought he is ridiculous for not recognizing it. But, he does. He just sees more faults in the streets around here and the neighborhood in general that I am able to. And it’s interesting to hear about. I didn’t even notice there are no side walks on his street until he pointed it out, haha. Still I wondered how a neighborhood can look nicer than this. Last night we drove through the Edina Country Club District, and I understood how. But oh my gosh. According to my eyes, Eden Prairie breaks the niceness bar (espeially when host/friend’s dad took me on an evening walk down to a local lake and I saw how the people near the water live…). So the places “above” that, I don’t know, it’s like it all blurs into one big soup of NICE and WOW and HOW?
Americans. Fun bunch. I overheard quite a few Americans the aiport in Oslo (why is it that you hear their voices so clearly in a crowd, even when they aren’t speaking especially loud, is there something in the timbre?). To be honest, I really wanted to talk to talk to them (=I wanted them to talk to me). I was starting to feel disappointed that it wasn’t happening when, in the queue to board the plane from Reykjavik to Minneapolis, one man asked me something, his family jumped in when I replied, and before I knew it six of us were talking and by the time we bere on the plane I had plans to hang out with one of the girls in the queue and an invitation to visit a University of Minnesota Research Center from another. And on the plane, I cracked jokes and shared stories with my two seatmates, a couple from North Dakota who had done been traveling Scandinavia for their 50th wedding anniversary. All these interactions felt like little blessings to my stay. Friendly people are the best thing in the world.
I also met some of host/friend’s friends last night, when we went grilling on lake Bde Maka Ska. They all met doing “Nordic skiing” (langrenn) in high school, but now their lives were so different from each other. Sitting there, hearing about one person’s incoming baby (one month left!), another’s breakup, someone else’s studies in Europe, and the last ones second bachelor’s degree and retail job, I once more felt like an antropologist, deep in the field. I’m very happy I have so much more time to do it.
Minneapolis. Yesterday we drove into the city for the first time. I saw a lot of the campus, and we even stopped to walk around the neighborhood I’m going to live in. Very different than Eden Prairie and Edina. Quirkier? I don’t have the word at the moment. They carried my favorite Michigan beer in one of the local bars. Weird weird weird.
Maja's Musings 