Traveling in Minnesota (USA) by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Traveling in Minnesota (USA) by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

I have been on several trips to Minnesota throughout my life, beginning as a small girl and ending as a Youth Services Librarian in middle age.

On a trip to Glacier National Park in Montana with my father, we stopped in Brainerd, Minnesota, so I could go to Paul Bunyan Land.

There is a huge statue of Paul Bunyan that moves and talks to kids as they enter the park.

The “tall tale,” or American myth about Paul Bunyan and his ox named Babe was the he was the lumberjack, who cleared the forests from Minnesota to the Pacific Northwest.

There were many small rides in Paul Bunyan Land that I liked, but one experience that marred my entire appreciation of the Park was a cruel, nickel game. 

For a nickel, you could prod a hen to play a piano with its beak.  When the piano recital was done, the hen would get a handful of corn feed for its efforts.  I knew that the hen was only fed when it played the piano.  (In 2018, I am sure this game is no longer there.)

I went back to Minneapolis-St. Paul for work when I helped put on the first Super Bowl in the Peoples’ Republic of China and did the public relations work for it.

I had a video of the game to show with Chinese announcers making commentary.  I had media kits available for conference attendees with all our PR clips for those people who wanted one.  Many international newspapers were unknown at the time.  We had access to them, because we had international newsstands in downtown Chicago.

I had a book by a University of Chicago professor that I let attendees look at about the different newspapers in the Peoples’ Republic of China.  Attendees wrote down the name of the book to buy in this new advertising market.  We had fun watching the video.  Minnesota is a football state, too.  The Vikings fans at that workshop wanted to get a winning football team to send to the Peoples’ Republic of China, too.

I gave them the names of my contacts at the Illinois Department of Commerce and the U.S. Foreign Commercial Service for information on how to set up trade delegations.  I told them my firm provided services like translation, interpretation, and production of marketing materials for businesses going overseas and showed them samples of our work.  (This is spiel.)

“The Chinese do not bow like the Japanese,” I said.  “They just shake hands, but you should present business cards with both hands to the Chinese with the Chinese-language side of the card facing up, so they can read it,” I said as I showed them how to do this.  (This is schtick.)

You can do little presentations like this to demonstrate what service firms do at a trade show.  This is what is called a nice take-away.

I told people I had studied Japanese, but had traveled to both countries.  I asked them, if they would like me to write their names in Japanese on the back of their business cards.  I knew the katakana alphabet for writing foreign names in Japanese quite well.  I wrote out names and the phonetic pronunciation of the character of the alphabet letter below. 

“Japanese is pronounced almost exactly like Spanish, so this is what your name sounds like,” I said as we went through the cards.

“The cards are presented in the same way as you do for the Chinese, but with bows.  You usually do three bows.  If you are the firm with lower profits, you bow first or if you are seeking sales from another firm, you bow first,” I said as I showed them how to do this.  (More schtick.)

Everyone at my stand would be practicing bowing and encourage other people to come over at look at what we were doing.

Finally, I would say, “I’d be happy to send you a free bid on translating your business card or any other materials you have in mind for marketing purposes.  We can do production work for any language in the world.”

I got requests for business card bids in several languages.  I had an envelope ready to keep all my business card requests in for quick response and a larger notepad of paper ready to ask people what other projects I might be able to provide a free bid on. 

I found out about all sorts of larger projects associated with the business card requests and asked if I could send in a free bid on those projects, too.  I did state on those written bids that the fees asked for were good for six months to one year.  After those dates had expired, I noted that we would be happy to submit a new bid.

One thing I learned in this sales job is that getting budgets for a project approved is hard and so is collecting the money that is due to you for completing a project.  If I volunteered to do a bid, I could find out a lot about getting paid (i.e. purchase orders, billing cycles – 30 to 90 days and so on). 

The added benefit of doing a free bid is that I learned to thoroughly understand the production process.  I went over similar work we had done with our production manager and went from there.  I would take my final bid estimate in to the production manager to look over before submitting it.

This trade conference was held at the University of Minnesota, which has nice gardens to walk through and is very clean or was at the time.  Minnesota is a state that has a large Scandinavian population.  (Scandinavians are Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian.  Finland is not related to these cultures linguistically or culturally.  It has a most-favored nation status with Russia for giving asylum to Vladimir Lenin.)

On the way to and from the University of Minnesota, you cross the origin of the mighty Mississippi River.  I wanted to go on trips south and west of that river someday in the United States.

The third time I went to Minnesota was with my husband Laurent.  He had a district meeting with his job at the American Chamber of Commerce outside Minneapolis, Minnesota at the Izaty’s Resort.  My mother agreed to take of Florence for the weekend, so we could have a small vacation.

On Saturday, while Laurent went to his meeting, I drove around Lake Mille Lacs to Isles.  That name cracked me up in translation from the Frenglish name – Lake Thousand Lakes.  Obviously, the name referred to all lakes in Minnesota that were created when the last glaciers retreated.

A state park dedicated to Father Hennepin further attested to the French exploration of the area.  Most of the Europeans in this area, though, are from Scandinavia.  The Objibway are the Native American tribe that originally inhabited the area.

When I arrived in Isle, I immediately saw the Norskhaus craft store, but had to start my souvenir shopping at the hardware store, because that was the only place that was open.

I bought two fishing tackle that were made in Isle and some toys for Florence.

The toys I bought at the grocery store for Florence included:

-dominoes

-white chalk

-a pick-up sticks game

-a little handheld pinball game

I just loved getting toys like that when I was a child.  I looked forward to showing Florence how to play these items.

I saw that the Norsk Haus was now open, and I proceeded to walk across the street.  I walked into a party happening at 10 am in the morning.

About fifteen Norwegian matrons were gathered around a “Congratulations” cake.  The owner of the store was signing copies of her first book, which detailed her romance with an American that brought her to Isle.

She invited me to have some cake and tea and asked me where I was from.  I told her about my wanderings that had brought me to Wisconsin.

I told her I would like to write a book.

“Everyone’s life has drama in it,” she said.

Her encouragement persuaded me to buy a Norwegian book for Florence called The Tomten and the Fox.  The tomten looked like a Norwegian leprechaun, but instead of tricking people a Tomten helped them.  In this story, the tomten protected the chickens from a wily fox for a family, who did not know how hard he worked.

The visit to the Norsk Haus left me in high spirits.  I thought the next town named Onamia might hold some unsuspected treasure as well as and set off to that town bent on discovering more about Scandinavian life.

I was particularly interested in getting some books about the mythical lumberjack Paul Bunyan for Florence.  (I could not find anything, but luckily I could find copies of Paul Bunyan stories in the library in Wisconsin where we lived.)

Unfortunately, Onamia just had a grocery store.  I did check it for Paul Bunyan books, but they did not have any.  If I had been truly adventurous, I would have driven to Brainerd to see the Paul Bunyan amusement park again.

I drove back just about the time Laurent got out of his meeting.  We walked around the golf course and admired leaves on the trees and kicked red and golden leaves with our feet.  It was October, the air was crisp, and winter was on its way. 

Dinner that night was really great, because I did not have to cook it.  I do really like chicken and rice, but almost all hotels serve it in the upper Midwest as the “meat” option that does not offend diners.

We said grace before eating and had a motivational speaker talk during the meal.  He also gave a lot of organizational tips on how to run solo sales operations. 

I forgot the speaker’s name, but I have used a lot of his organizational tips like keeping a clean and organized work area, having lots of pens and paper, and keeping stationery on hand to write thank-you notes that you can put a business card in for follow-up.  No one writes thank-you notes anymore, so people who do this really stand out.

I have also gone to Minneapolis to obtain information about how to run Big Reads for the National Endowment for the Arts on Grapes of Wrath and Fahrenheit 451 when I was the Youth Services Librarian for Monterey County (California). 

We had an advantage in teaching the students of Monterey County about what was in these books by having actors from the Western Stage come in and do monologues about important points from the book after which I would go through discussion questions.

All in all, I have very good memories of my trips to Minnesota.  I would still recommend going there on vacation even though I have not been there in a awhile.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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