Today, the plan was to have a kickass time at the 10,000 Sounds Music Festival. The problem was, we last minute found out that it's a 21+ show— a fact that they forgot to advertise on the homepage, banners, and countless radio mentions I heard over the month, might I add. Since I had already taken the day off, I figured why not do something fun anyway.
And so, me, Ally, Alvin, and Anthony got together around 9:20 am and headed to the Mall of America. We ate our breakfast there and went shopping for a few hours. We shopped our butts off at the overwhelmingly large Forever 21 store, took silly photobooth pictures at the Doc Martens store and sent some to Mr. Terpstra (a former economics teacher of ours), and we found an Italian restaurant that smells like dogs (perhaps it's the smell of some grains or wheaty ingredient).
After we were done with our shopping, we headed over to IKEA. For whatever reason, Saturday afternoon is the perfect time for people to crowd inside of IKEA stores. Our IKEA trip was filled with sitting on couches, beds, and chairs, and reading the Swedish names of items out loud. Anthony was in heaven; he bought a set of 310 thread count bed sheets, a set of Space Invader decals, and wooden hangers. The whole time I had an overwhelming yearning to live in a cozy brick apartment in St. Paul and decorate it with cute IKEA things. I was fantasizing about buying cute rugs, furniture, wall decor, and lamps for my future apartment.
Once Anthony was done purchasing his items with the help of a cashier that looked a lot like T-Pain, we made our way to the Walker Art Center. None of us had ever been to the Walker Art Center, and getting there in the first place was quite the ordeal. There were plenty of exits missed, lane changes gone awry, expletives directed at Google Maps, and angry drivers behind us. Needless to say, we were extremely relieved when we finally got there.
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| A super cool pic of the Walker Art Center, taken from the official website: http://www.walkerart.org/visit |
The first thing we did was check out the gift shop. Art museum gift shops make me drool. I skimmed through thick books with delight, played with all the cool little gadgets, and indulged in the beautiful ambiance that is art museums.
After we had our fill of the gift shop, we finally remembered that we still had to explore the museum. Once we got our visitor tabs at the desk, the lady told us that we had 45 minutes left before the museum closed. All of a sudden I recalled the MOMA debacle from March and had a slight panic— what if we don't explore it all in time?
It's always difficult exploring a museum under time constraints. You want to get to everything but still be able to take the time to absorb it all in depth, and it's difficult to figure out that balance, especially in a museum you've never been to before. We quickly zipped through the museum within half an hour, and missed a few galleries because they were closed for maintenance. After we knew we had gone through everything, we went back to carefully analyze and get a full look at what we saw.
I had a lot of fun going through the museum and reading the stories behind the pieces. I'll be honest that I was weirded out by a handful of the pieces, but it's a modern art museum, what can you do? I was immediately reminded of MOMA, even as we stepped into the gift shop. I truly enjoyed the clean white walls and minimalistic ambiance, as well as the interactive set up.
Once the museum closed, we walked over to the sculpture garden. It was a lot of fun, minus the hot and humid weather. There were three weddings going on at the same time, which was kind of fun to watch from afar. We went through the Cowles Conservatory, marveled at the beautiful plants, and viewed the sculptures, including the iconic Spoonbridge and Cherry sculpture often accompanied with Twin Cities/Minnesota guide books. Meanwhile, Anthony was taking pictures of the sculptures and adding hilarious captions to them on Snapchat.
After a long an exhausting hour or so of walking, we sat down and tried to figure out where to go for dinner. We ended up going to Peninsula, a Malaysian cuisine restaurant located on Eat Street. We ordered achat salad, roti canai, shrimp fried rice, and mango beef with white rice. The food was spot on and super delicious. Although it was pricier than we had expected, we were able to split the cost between four people and pay about $10 each.
Overall, it was a fun and exciting day. It was extremely exhausting and stressful at times, but it was totally worth it. I cannot wait to go back.
