Better to be Poor and Pleasant...

Today we took the bus into St Paul proper and visited the Minnesota Children's Museum. It was great! Micah had a great time touching things, pulling levers, turning nobs, pushing buttons, listening to stories, climbing stairs and crawling through tunnels. The concepts being taught to children at this museum were surprisingly complex. For example, the device pictured below (bottom right) was showing how different 3D shapes could be created by moving a circle in different ways through space. By turning the wheel at the front of the machine the circle inside could be rotated around it's centre to make a sphere, moved left and right to make a cylinder and revolved about a coplanar axis outside the circle to make a torus. I'm not sure how much of that Micah understood, but I was impressed.

This was our first trip into downtown St Paul. There are many things that I could say about St Paul, but what really stuck in my mind as we rode the bus home was the people. Even though many of them seemed to be of fairly low socioeconomic standing, they were lovely. The people living in our apartment complex (several miles from downtown St Paul) and the surrounding area are the same. I find this situation far preferable to living in a 'richer' suburb, where no one talks to anyone.