The rest of PLA and Minneapolis

Do you know who that is? Between Sheila and I? If you guessed Mary Richards from the Mary Tyler Moore Show, you're right! :) The show was set in Minneapolis, and there is a statue of her just blocks from our hotel. We HAD to get our picture taken with her. Sheila's covering it, but she's wearing super kicky boots! So one morning we took a walk, saw the above statue, visited the Minneapolis Public Library (which is SOOOO cool!) and walked down to the river. I have LOTS of pictures of that morning, and only a couple here. So if you want to see more check out my PLA gallery.

The outside of the library has a pattern painted onto all the windows. You can see them from the outside, but from the inside it doesn't impair your view. Each side is different. The below side is Birch trees (can you see them?),one side is water (for the river), one is grain and grasses and the last is snow. It's very cool.
Overall I was very impressed with the library. It had a lot of really great stuff. One thing I particularly loved were there "compact stacks". They're on rails and they sit close together. When you want to get a book within that aisle, you push that button you can see on the side, and they slide apart. There is, of course, a safety mechanism that senses if anything passes between the stacks (like an arm, leg or whatever), and it immediately stops. This is a great way to shelve more books when you don't have much space. It' s so cool!
The kids area was really great, with fabulous colors and all sorts of great things for them to play with and on. The teen area was amazing! One of my favourite things was this one room. The walls were painted with this silver white-board material and the kids could write anyting they wanted on it...as long as they stayed within the guidelines (like no profanity etc).

Then Saturday we were off to the Mall of America. My favourite thing was the aquarium. It was quite cool, and I'm really glad we went. There was this one giant turtle that weighed about 600 lbs and took five men to move him onto the scale. The best past was the tunnel. The tunnel went through all the pools, sharks, Amazon, shallow water reefs etc. Very cool. On my Flickr site are a couple pictures from there.

Ok, so last year Jesse, the largest shark at the aquarium, decided to try and eat one of the other sharks. She grabbed this little reef shark and swam around with it in her mouth! Luckily, the little shark was not hurt. In 2003 Jesse did eat another shark. They named the little shark Fish Stick, and she's back in the tank, fully recovered.