Life in pictures: 01

Our block of apartments is the brown one on the left, we're on the 10th floor!

The first 4 levels have car parks as well as flats. Level 4 is little india and the whole floor smells of fragrant curries 24/7!!

 

The view from our apartment! Flat as a tack.

Also from our apartment, this building in front is the MN Convention Centre. 

The approach into the city... the big plumes of smoke which punctuate the skyline show how much heating is being used to warm us all up!

Mall of America's internal rollercoaster rides and amusement parks!! It's really empty because it's a Tuesday.

Guy's polish meal at Kramarczuk's in St Anthony Main... beef mince with rice wrapped up in a big cabbage leaf with sauerkraut and a big gloopy sauce!!

My polish sausage, with sauerkraut (of course!) cheese and pickle... came with a side of potato salad too!

Everyone's SO nice.

Yesterday we met a lovely guy called Birk [berr-k]. (Yes, we had to get him to repeat it twice. Birk. No, not Dirk. Not Gert. It was noisy, you see. Birk.)

And, he was a really lovely, helpful guy who worked at this great cocktail bar and gave us lots of handy hints and tips on the city. But, unfortunately his name fell into that category of names which Jane Walmsley, author of 'Brit-think, Ameri-think: A translantic survival guide', identifies as one that Brits (or Aussies for that matter) are never, EVER called. According to Jane it's similar to calling your little girl 'Candida' in the US, or nicknaming your best chum 'Randy' in England. It just doesn't work.

But, Berk was very nice. So nice, infact, that he halved our bill as a 'welcome-to-this-ridiculously-cold-city present'! Now that's NICE! 

And he hasn't been the only nice one. Sayed who runs a restaurant in the Warehouse district said we could ring him if we were ever lost; and Susan from a designer furniture store in Uptown said if there is anything, seriously anything, we needed help with – we should just to pick up the phone. (Hmmm, what about cleaning the apartment?) Ron from the best kitchen shop ever (which sells a megalithic barbecue for 9000 bucks) wanted to drink pints of Guinness with the husband; Grant, from a certain mobile, sorry 'cell', provider buried deep within a skyway mall, was so nice he chaperroned us all the way to where we wanted to go when we started to create a whirlpool in the skyway system; and Tim our bank manager said we could stay in his log cabin for a week and he'd take us ice fishing. (Sorry. That one isn't actually exactly true.)

So, is all this 'niceness' making us run for the hills? (We have been living in London after all, where a mere glance and nod from a stranger provokes thoughts of 'happy slapping' filmed on mobile phones.)

No! Of course not! We're going to happily keep on floating along this swell river of niceties. It's such a refreshing change. Plus, we figure if we can keep getting half the bill knocked off our final tabs for a while, then that would be terribly nice indeed!