I have never been underwhelmed with a place as I was with Minneapolis-St. Paul. Maybe my expectations were high? Getting into St. Paul, I was impressed at how clean and orderly the city is. The are modern apartments and the city layout is just right. Very few vagrants. I was further impressed with the train Union Station as the interior looked like an airport and the building is big, clean and imposing and much better than London’s or Stockholm’s. Then it just turned bad from here. I zipped quickly to “The Buttered Tin”, the best breakfast in town. What I got was a meal with scrambled eggs toast and greens. At a $15 tag, it just seemed pricey and pretentious. The patrons who were dining were a mix of obese people and old matrons. I waited for some good looking people to come in and make a coffee house look like a runway like they do in Stockholm but no luck. i thought Seattle was a snotty city but I think they have a right to because a lot of them look cool and are talented. But Minneapolis? Meeeh.

Then I have to look for a place to stay and the only reasonable accommodation I got was a $110 room in the obscure part of the city. Going around the city I have noticed a much higher than normal proportion of Hmong Vietnamese and Somali women wearing burkas. I Stood at the middle of downtown for about fifteen minutes hoping to catch some stunning locals, no luck. Then I went to the Mall of America, the largest mall in US of A. It has a roller coaster in the middle but other than that, it was a ho-hum place. Ate at the smallish food court and went people watching and much to my surprise I wasn’t able to see a single stunner. The good thing about this discovery is that it narrowed my options for “preferred playground”.