The Impulsive Traveler: Minneapolis, beyond Mary Tyler Moore

The big beefy guy didn’t really look like the jewelry-making type, but there he was, surrounded by beautiful baubles, stringing delicate purple beads onto a necklace.

Somewhere else, I might have just walked on by, but the intimate setting and handmade wares at Minneapolis’s Midtown Global Market encourage chatting. So I learned that Brad Herring — “Just like the fish,” he said — gave jewelry-making a shot after two heart attacks made him rethink his high-pressure job.

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“I went to a farmer’s market and saw people making their own jewelry,” he told me. “I thought, ‘Hey, I can do that.’”

The last time I visited my sister-in-law in Minnesota, I did the two things that everyone apparently does in Minneapolis. I pretended to toss my hat into the air next to the Mary Tyler Moore statue downtown and shopped until my feet hurt at the Mall of America. This time, traveling with my husband and young daughter, I wanted to see the city a little differently. With only two days to explore, we decided to check out Midtown Global Market, as well as Mill Ruins Park and the Mill City Museum.

The stalls of specialty groceries, international arts and crafts and prepared food seemed to be laid out randomly inside the eclectic market. My husband, Brian, and I spent a little too much time circling around the same few rows trying to find the “wall of cookies” he said he’d spotted earlier in the day.

But getting lost there was more fun than frustrating. Around one corner I found Holy Land, a Middle Eastern grocery and deli, where I asked the general manager for help finding orange blossom water. She thought for a second, then motioned for me to follow her past rows of hookahs and packages of goat kidneys before pulling a bottle of the clear, pungent distillate down from its place next to a huge sack of basmati rice.

Around another corner I bought an $8 cow horn bracelet from Simba Craftware, which sells handmade goods such as statues, masks, banana leaf earrings and beaded sandals from 23 different African countries.

I grabbed a cornhusk-wrapped pork tamale for lunch at La Loma before indulging in a chocolate and caramel cupcake from Salty Tart, a bakery whose chef, Michelle Gayer, was a 2010 James Beard Foundation Awards nominee. My daughter, Chloe, munched a pastry from the Scandinavian food and gift shop Cafe Finspang as we checked out toy dragons at Hmong Handicrafts and homemade soaps at Rituals. Three hours later, we called it a day, although it felt as though there was a lot left to explore — and eat.

The international flavor of Midtown Global Market may represent where Minneapolis is going, but Mill Ruins Park and the nearby Mill City Museum provide an essential look at where it has been. Urban ruins seem natural in places like Rome but come as something of a surprise here in the United States, where historic buildings are so often turned into trendy lofts or office space without hesitation. Even Midtown Global Market is housed in the historic Midtown Exchange building.