St. Paul Vignettes (37 cents)

Four days in St. Paul, Minnesota. Vignettes.

On Thursday morning, I had coffee and a bagel at Dunn's (sort of a local Starbucks). The Dunns is in an office building at the corner of 5th and Wabasha. It shares it space with an eyeglass store. Weird, I thought....., but then.......

I decided I needed to get my shoes shined, and I found someone who shined shoes while wandering the St. Paul skywalks. The shoeshine stand sits right in the middle of the office of a mortgage loan company (Bell is the name of the mortgage company; I was told it was the largest private residential mortgage lender in Minnesota).

In Washington, DC, there are some parking meters where it would cost you almost $2 to park for an hour, and it is difficult to find a parking lot where $2 would buy you an hour of parking, but......in St. Paul, I found a place where you can park all day for $1.25.

I had two firsts, when I had lunch at a restaurant on University whose name is something like Chang Geng (but not exactly). The first first is that I had never been in a Cambodian restaurant before; the second first is that when I asked the very nice waitress how the chicken, mixed vegetables and peanut sauce was, she said: "It is not something that everyone can eat. Are you allergic to peanuts?"

We saw the Friday night "dress rehearsal" performance of Prairie Home Companion at the Fitzgerald (yes, it is F. Scott) Auditorium, and were surprised that it is a show. Garrison Keillor does not sit at a desk like Jay Leno; he struts and walks; there is a set consisting of a two story Lake Wobegon house, there is a five piece combo, etc. It was much more entertaining than I thought it would be, but went on very long......like 2 1/2 hours. Best line, I thought, was when Keillor was talking (in his very very clever opening monologue, much better than his later visit to Lake Wobegon) about the strange young men and women with their many tattoos who you see near university campuses, including one young man whose face looked like he had fallen head first into a tackle box.

Terrific food at the St. Paul Grill (been there before; still as good), Fhima's (not Brownie's outfit), A Rebours (best new restaurant in the Twin Cities in 2005, says their version of the Washingtonian Magazine) and even the Carousel in the Radisson Riverfront (or at least as far as the walleye goes). The Cambodian food (sans peanuts, I decided) was also good.

Looking for Joan Didion's new book, my wife was told at the Border's in St. Paul that, as Didion had just spoken in town, the book was sold out at all the Border's and that you probably could not find it anywhere in the Twin Cities. That sounded weird, but we stopped at the Borders on the way to the airport, and lo and behold - - - they were out as well. So........where did we find it? In the bookstore at the airport that apparently had no problem keeping up with their stock. My wife says that Border's is becoming like CVS: they are guaranteed to have everything except the one thing you want.

Very friendly place, St. Paul. Very friendly. And everyone talks with a Jesse Ventura accent, and says "Yah" and "OhhhKay" a lot.

Ohhhkay? Yah!