Wednesday, September 5, 2012

A Quick Look at St Paul and The Mall of America

I had high hopes for this post and this trip in general, but I knew going in my schedule was going to be tight, and mostly likely I wouldn't see everything I wanted to see.  As expected, my original "2 Days in the Twin Cities" post got nixed and instead I get to write about a very brief visit to St. Paul and the Mall of America.

After a quick layover in Milwaukee, I arrived in the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport Saturday morning around 10 AM.  I went to The Mall of America in Bloomington, MN directly from the airport.  Conveniently it is right next door.  It probably took me longer to find a parking spot at the mall than it did to drive there from the airport.  There appeared to be 4 floors and a basement in the mall, but the basement is the aquarium and the top floor looked like it was mostly the movie theater and some bars.  That leaves 3 floors of shopping, excluding the space in the center dedicated to the Nickelodeon Universe amusement park (I'll get to that in a second).  As far as shopping goes, I must be spoiled living in Boston.  I was not wow'd with the selection.  There were multiples of many of the stores and there were no high end stores at all.  My go-to store for work clothes, Brooks Brothers, was no where to be found.  Most of the stores catered to working class families, which makes sense considering where the mall is located.  Having worked in retail during high school, I keep thinking about how awful it must be walking around that mall in December, haha.

Nickelodeon Universe
The definite cool factor to the mall in the indoor amusement park. It is geared towards younger kids, but there are plenty of big kid rides too, including an inverted roller coaster.  I glanced at the prices, and if I remember correctly, a day pass is $30.  That is not bad at all considering you could spend all day riding rides.  One word of advice... Do not buy toys in the toy shops in the center of the mall.  You are paying amusement park prices when you can go to the Target down the street and get the same things for half the price.  They really try to rip you off in these stores, and if you decide you want to return something because you did find it for a cheaper price, they make you wait forever for a manager to come by because they typically don't do returns.  I guess that makes sense if you think of it as an amusement park, but it doesn't make sense if you think of it as a toy store.  Also flanking the center part of the mall is a lego store (super cool!) and a giant American Girl Doll store.  My little cousins would have loved this!

On a riverboat floating down the Mississippi
Part of Day 2 was spent in St. Paul.  Knowing that I only had a little time in the city, I looked to my trusted trip planning sources and booked a 1.5 hour sight-seeing tour along the Mississippi river with Paddelford Riverboats.  I love historic things and I figured this would be a good way to see some highlights of the area; boy was I wrong.  The "tour" was a pre-recorded narration of the exact same words as what was listed on the paper map.  In addition, there were long periods with no narration at all, including the entire second half of the trip.  Most of the people were not paying attention and it was hard to hear the sound coming out of the sparsely placed speakers.  To top it all off, there was really nothing much to see on this sigh-seeing tour.

If you are ever in the area, I'd say to pass on this experience. The rest of my day including driving around the city and trying to find the Como Park Zoo (no parking anywhere so I didn't go).  I left St. Paul feeling very underwhelmed.  Based on this trip, I'm not sure Minnesota is the place for me.  I did enjoy all of the lakes though.

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