Minneapolis

I made several visits to Minneapolis between 2013 and 2017, while my wife was completing her PhD at the University of Minnesota. I’d been an Americanophile for most of my life, and I’d spent five years at university studying American history myself, including a year living in St. Louis, Missouri. I’d also spent much of my teens and early twenties listening to The Replacements, a band who’d formed a few blocks from where my wife lived in Uptown Minneapolis, so this was both a familiar and deeply alien place to me. We got married there in 2014, up in the skyways of the Hennepin County Government Centre. I haven’t been back since 2017, which coincided with the US taking a sharp political turn, and I can’t see myself returning any time soon. But Minneapolis holds an important place in my life.