Assalamualaikum, hello 🙂
It’s been a fun (but tiring) long weekend, a much-needed break before the last few weeks of the semester. Alhamdulillah, I had the chance to go on a mini road trip to Minneapolis, Minnesota with a bunch of my friends from Illinois (and one from Iowa) for our Thanksgiving break (and Black Friday shopping!).
It started off with a mini Thanksgiving lunch at our house on Wednesday afternoon. They (friends from UIUC and Iowa) came to Madison to pick me up, and enjoy a small Thanksgiving lunch, with the turkey and everything. Afterwards, we brought them around the campus for a little while before heading on our way to Minneapolis, Minnesota for the long weekend.
It was a pretty long drive to Minneapolis, and we reached a little bit before 11pm. Since most restaurants have already closed or are closing, some of them bought takeaways from a nearby place to eat at our host houses (Izzati’s for the girls and Syazrain’s and Zainal’s for the guys). The girls ended up eating the food for breakfast anyhow, since most of us fell asleep pretty quick that night.
Thursday morning and afternoon were spent with some of our friends at the University of Minnesota by touring the campus a little bit and having a lunch buffet at a halal restaurant. We went to the Mall of America for a little while and went on a couple of rides at the Nickelodeon Universe (I wanted to ride on the crazy one, and as usual, Aiman had to go along with me on it, even though he hated roller-coaster rides and all).
After an early buffet dinner at another halal restaurant, we went to BestBuy to start our Black Friday shopping spree. Some of us bought Xbox One consoles, laptops and even a TV and a bunch of other tech stuff. I didn’t buy anything though, since I know I didn’t really need much. We then head straight to Albertville Premium Outlets for some serious shopping.
We reached Albertville around 10:30pm or so, and stayed there until 10:40am in the morning. Yes. 12 hours of shopping. It. Was. CRAZY. Like, literally, it was super crazy. I was lucky that we only had to wait outside of Coach for about 10 or 15 minutes (note: this was at night, in the cold, while it’s SNOWING) before we were allowed to go in the outlet, but others had to wait for more than half an hour just to GET IN. And that doesn’t include all the time taking pictures of the bags, comparing prices and designs, and repeating the process again and again and again to satisfy those back home.
Aiman & I (obviously we’d be shopping together, like duh) shopped until around 3am or so, before heading back to the car to sleep and rest (well, he slept, I didn’t. Not much, anyway). Around 8am, we started on our shopping spree for a little while as we searched for my boots and bought some chocolates, and by 10:40am, all of us (all 3 cars) are done with shopping (or forced to be done with shopping) and head to the same buffet restaurant that we went to for dinner the night before.
Since Aiman & I shared some Subway sandwich in the morning, we weren’t really hungry for lunch, so we stayed in the car and slept while they ate their lunch buffet (this time, I slept well). After lunch, some of them wanted to do even MORE shopping, so we head to Mall of America. At MoA, Aiman & I walked around BestBuy and met some of our INTEC friends like Fariz. We then decided to go to Macy’s (Fariz and Aiman had to pray), where I shopped for more handbags while waiting for them. We walked around and talk and window shopped until around 5pm or so when we had to bid farewell to Fariz and head back home.
Kamal, Nad, Aiman & I were in the same car throughout the trip, and we decided to go and grab some dinner before heading back home (others went back to sleep first and planned on having dinner after some rest). That night, I fell asleep pretty early and woke up at 1am, feeling hungry again -.-. It’s a good thing Aiman also woke up in the middle of the night, and that there’s a pizza shop nearby that opens until 3am, so we went out in the middle of the night for a snack.
Saturday morning (more like afternoon), we went out for a final lunch before I bid farewell to them since they had to leave for Iowa already (they went back to Illinois through Iowa as they had to drop off Farhana). I then spent some time with our other friends in Minnesota and hung out with them before my trip back to Madison with three other friends from Madison on Sunday morning.
So, yeah, that basically wraps up my Thanksgiving break. It was certainly a fun trip with my friends, and I can also check off Minessota from my ‘States to Visit with Aiman Ardani’ list (3 states with him in the 3+ months he’s been in the US so far) (you can also find it on Instagram with the hashtag #SyazDaniInUSA hihihi). And it was certainly a much needed break from studying, as I gear myself for the last three weeks (gulp) of the semester. With finals and (another gulp) my FM exam coming up, I really needed to cool myself down and enjoy a bit of the snow before things get too hectic to handle.
Anyhow. That’s that, and, yeah. I’ve been thinking about a possible blog post for next week, if things get too busy and I couldn’t spend too much time thinking about a topic. I’m probably just going to choose a post by Humans of New York and write my thoughts about it, probably. That seems like a fun thing to do. 🙂
Oh, and happy December everyone 🙂 Stay awesome!
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