Twin Cities

Minneapolis, MN--Just arrived at the hotel in downtown Minneapolis having finally (finally!) crossed the Mississippi.  Midwestern cities always just spring up out of nowhere--you're in farmland and perhaps some suburban sprawl but nothing too dense, and all of a sudden BLAM you're staring up at skyscrapers and feeling your physical insignificance in a slightly different dimension from the farmland's enormous plains and sky.  Been reading Canterbury Tales since I clearly didn't understand them at fifteen years old, and consequently have been thinking in incoherent Chaucerian couplets all day.  It's actually kind of fun, especially when you don't show them to anyone else.

Minneapolis and St. Paul border each other across the Mississippi--glance at a map of the area and you'll get a mental image in your head of what it looks like on the ground, which is a large-scale version of the Twin Villages (if you're reading and you happen to have never been to Damariscotta-Newcastle, Maine, Google it).  You'll be wrong.  Approaching from the east along I-94, you see 'scrapers in the distance and assume you're looking at both Minneapolis and St. Paul together.  Then you arrive, and you start noticing that instead of going through, you're going around this (blatantly false) city center, as though it's a giant trompe l'oeil built by Paul Bunyan expressly to fool arrogant amateur geographers like myself.  It turns out that downtown St. Paul is a good five miles or more from downtown Minneapolis--they're both located against the River, but if the River forms a giant V, they're located at the two upper points.  So you pass the 'scrapers of St. P and then drive through a bit more suburban stuff and then you can finally see those of Minneapolis.  It's a bit of a mind-fuck, at least if you're arrogant enough to think, having only seen a map, that you know what it looks like on the ground.

Going to dinner, might post again later.  Free high-speed wifi is a goddamn blessing.