St. Paul Highlights

The highlight and reason for our weekend in St. Paul was Magnus' and Anita's wedding. What a beautiful, happy couple. We hadn't seen Magnus in over 4 years and it was great to be reunited with him and with Dominik and Frauke. The ceremony was held at a Unitarian church and it was simple and meaningful in both English and Swedish. The reception was held at the Science Museum where there was great food, good music and dancing (the groom can dance!) and many great speeches.

I was quite excited about visiting St. Paul since I am a fan of A Prairie Home Companion. I was surprised by how pretty and diverse the city is. And it was also very clean. However, at the same time, it seemed quite dead and I'm wondering if most people headed out of town for the long weekend. Either that or St. Paul is the first city I see staying ahead of the population growth curve (there's no traffic, everything is clean). And as far as the diversity, I expected to see a lot of Norwegians, but instead I've seen a lot of people from different cultures and a lot of Irish pubs.

We took the red-eye out here and spent most of Friday relaxing and walking around a bit. On Saturday we checked out the Science musuem and attended the wedding. Sunday we spent most of the day vegging in front of the tv, with a little walking around (ate at Mickey's famous diner and checked out the Fitzgerald theater) and monitoring of the weather. Every channel on TV had weather updates and tornado watches. As we sat looking out the window in our hotel room, we had a scary storm pass by with big, dark clouds, a little rain, and lots of wind, including small funnel clouds. But it only lasted about 15 minutes.