Coming Home- A Day in St. Paul, MN

Entry to the St. Paul Hotel

What to do on a cloudy, muggy, warm day in St. Paul? If you're lucky enough to be staying at the St. Paul Hotel, you walk about 2 blocks to the Science Museum of Minnesota.

We were very fortunate to catch an exhibit of treasures from King Tut's tomb. It was big & very impressive & took us nearly an hour & a half to go through! On the way out, I bought a new duck:

It's for my duck collection :) I couldn't resist, & we've been singing "King Duck" (to the tune of Steve Martin's "King Tut") ever since...

The other really cool thing (among many) they had was the Seismophone, part of which you see above. It's a musical instrument that's connected to the internet site that senses earthquakes around the world & records them. The seisomophone plays folk tunes from the country that is nearest each recorder earthquake. During lunch, which we ate just below the rig pictured above, I was sure I heard something in the pentatonic mode... & when we checked the computer, sure enough, the most recent quake was off the coast of Japan.

We napped for a couple of hours in the afternoon, then had dinner at a Japanese restaurant about half a block away :) It's become a sort of tradition to eat Japanese while we're transitioning back to food here. Then we came back to our room & watched the PBS station for a couple of hours- they had a good special about comedy & comedians, I was able to finish the mittens for my 9th Nerd Wars 2 dissertation hat (yay!), & we went to bed after 10:00 pm!

This morning I woke up starving again, but at 7:30 rather than 2:30 (thank goodness). We all had the same breakfasts as yesterday because it was so yummy, then packed everything up, & are just about ready now, to catch our cab to the airport for the last leg home. The emails from home have been warning us it's hot & muggy there, too, but I'm feeling a certain immunity, after our very warm time in Japan :) I'm looking forward to becoming reacquainted with my very own bed tonight! Onward...