Sunday was spent in Saint Paul where we visited the Minnesota History Center – home of Grainland, a ginormous jungle gym shaped like a grain elevator:
You can climb in and chose which grain you want to be – wheat or corn. Then, you follow different paths all the way back down to the floor. Totally fun, but there’s something about being a grownup that makes crawling on your knees much more painful than it was when you were a kid. I could only to through it once before my knees wouldn’t let me go anymore. The GF didn’t fare much better, suffering a skinned knee because she didn’t see a step on the way up to the top. Just goes to show you that, much like sharks and strange dogs, you must show Grainland proper respect, or it’ll attack you viciously.
On Monday, we had a flight back to Chicago in the afternoon, so we decided to hook up with my little brother (Lil’bear) and introduce the GF to capitalism’s holiest shrine – the Mall of America. Being natives, Lil’bear and myself find the MOA to be just another mall. It’s bigger, and it’s got some stores that are a little unusual, but for the most part, it’s just like all the other malls out there. When it opened it had some truly unique stores (my favorite original store was the one that sold art made of weird metal wireforms and dead butterflies) but now it’s more or less the same stores you see in all other malls (Gap, Old Navy, Banana Republic, Sephora, EB Games, etc). But still, there are a few brave souls who color outside of the lines and open the sort of weird stores that heralded the MOA’s heyday. We visited some of them, including the wedding chapel and the Minnesota Public Radio Store. We also rode the new roller coaster that is pretty fun (picture sitting in a tilt-a-whirl and spinning around as you ride down the track instead of facing forward in your seat) and went to Underwater World (not Atlantis, but rather "the world's largest underground aquarium"*. But the most interesting experience was the oxygen bar.
Yes, the Mall of America finally has its very own oxygen bar. It markets itself as a “relaxation station” where folks can come in and (for $20) breathe scented oxygen. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have even considered it, but at this place, you also get to sit in comfy massage chairs. I figured that I’ve paid way more than $20 for a massage, so what the heck. Plus, the GF was excited about it (I think because it appealed to her inner southern Californian). So, we all buckled in and were given our own green “nose hose” – which looked like the tubing that people with emphysema wear – and were each settled into a massage chair next to the oxygen machine. Each machine had four “aromatherapy” scents that you could choose from. Mine were Peppermint, Lemongrass, Strawberry, and some sort of new-agey name thing that I can’t remember (something like “emphatic”, I think). I inhaled deeply, hoping to experience the oxygen high I’d been promised while the attendant turned on the massage chair…
That’s when the truth was revealed. The “massage chair” was not so much a massage chair as it was a device of torture. It felt not like a massage but instead like there was a wrathful midget trapped inside the chair that was heck-bent on clubbing me to death with a lead pipe – even in the calfs (calves?) of my legs. It was so painful that no relaxation was possible, and when coupled with the collection of potently-smelling gases that they referred to as “aromatherapy” it brought the fun level down to about “tooth extraction”. Still, determined that something must be good about this I stuck it out for the full 15 minutes, when I was unhooked and allowed to head back up to the front desk for 5 more minutes of different-smelling aromas (just as potent) and a free “energy drink” which tasted like drinking Dr. Pepper syrup straight up. Blech.
By the time the GF and Lil’bear came out we all agreed that this was pretty much the biggest waste of $20 any of us had ever experienced.
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