No love in the Twin Cities so far. I was hoping for double the freshness. Like two mentos, one on either side of the teeth, up against the cheeks, and you lift the tube up to your mouth to pop in a third, but then you stop yourself. No, you think, two is enough, and you slowly lower the tube, trying to wrap the top piece up with leftover wrapping, but realizing only too late that there just isn’t enough wrapping left to get good enough coverage. So you pop that third mentos in anyway. Yeah. The Twin Cities.
All this talk about mentos has got me thinking. What about? Fig Newtons. That’s right those little square things you used to get as a kid with that magical flavor. They were no Oreos of course, but how do you compete with Oreos? They’re interactive. You grab and twist and pull apart. Maybe sneak a little lick of the frosting, then put the top back on like nothing happened. But Fig Newtons, Fig Newtons. They were almost like little pop tarts, but with a special flavor. You couldn’t heat them up like pop tarts, but let’s face it, that was always a double edged sword. You’d play a little roulette game with the timer knob on the toaster, trying to hit that sweet spot between just as lukewarm as when you put it in and mouth blisteringly hot. It still haunts me. The sweet smell of toasted pastry and strawberry scent, as my tongue felt like it was covered in gooey napalm. None of that risk with Fig Newtons. No way. Safest snack there was. You couldn’t even get that filling stuff on your hands. Why? Becaue it was ingeniously wrapped in a thin layer of cake, of course. And inside, that fig goodness. Which brings me to what I wanted to tell you. You can get whole dried figs, and they taste just like a thousand fig newtons concentrated and purified.
Good food. You’ve always gotta be on the look out for it. Minneapolis has some great places to eat, but it can be easy to get some things confused here, like, things aren’t always where you would think they would be or they aren’t what you’d think they’d be called. There’s the US Bank stadium which looks like it time-traveled here from the future, or the city hall which looks like a purple castle stolen from the past. And anyone ever eat at that Lickity Splits place downtown, by the purple castle? I thought the wait staff was a bit confrontational, and the food was rubbery, but the decor was simply fascinating. And if you head out towards the Arts distract from there, you’ll get to Glam Dolls Donuts, where you can stop afterwards to pick up something for a little fun later.
Speaking of the stadium and city hall, there really are a lot of marvels of architecture and civil engineering in and around the cities. It makes the amazing seem within reach, easy, and that starts to give you unreasonable expectations. Why isn’t everything unbelievably great? For instance, I noticed while driving into the cities on the freeway that no one was vending chili dogs to commuters at freeway speeds. There were no special chili dog lanes. There were no special EZ chili dog pass readers. And there were no pneumatic chili dog cannons that target and fire a chili dog into the drivers window of your moving vehicle after automatically billing you.
What’s the deal? Is it too much to expect high velocity chili dog delivery systems on our nation’s freeways? They time traveled the stadium in from the future, so why no chili dogs?
