Decent & Underrated
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1/11/2021
I've only visited here, but at least half a dozen times and mostly for work. Minneapolis is the only Midwest city I'm familiar with having only visited Chicago twice by comparison. In fact (surprisingly) much of the geography and weather of the city and surrounding suburbs reminds me a lot of where I grew up in Northern NJ.
There are some other posters who have said Minneapolis gets overlooked and I'd have to agree with that. It has a clean and walk-able downtown, tons of bars, great food, nice hotels, art exhibits and museums, a major airport, great Universities & Fortune 500 company HQ's etc. Even the metro system is underrated. Aside lakes there are apparently a lot of bike trails as well but never tried them.
Does "Minnesota Nice" exist? Definitely, but not everyone who lives there is this type of passive aggressive. Some locals are especially sheltered and think MSP is the center of the universe (which clearly it's not). After visiting several times, it's easy to spot out these folks and move on. I've also found many in MSP are pretty independent as well and as I get older, I really tend to appreciate this personality trait (or maybe I'm just a cold person haha). It's also worth noting that it seems like the whole state for the most part is becoming more Conservative as time goes on (with some exceptions).
Speaking of cold, this is the major drawback with Minneapolis. Think of your typical Humid Continental climate on steroids: The winters are longer & colder, the summers are stickier & humid, and there really isn't much of a spring or fall season. I'll never forget last year when I was up there a week before Thanksgiving and it snowed and stuck to the ground in downtown and it was 5 degrees in the late afternoon. My legs were completely numb walking half a mile back to the hotel from my office.
I echo the other comments: don't move here if you can't handle the cold. And if you do, having an already established friend group would certainly help things out with "breaking the ice."
Thomas | Redondo Beach, CA