Winter in Winnipeg part 4

Lily showed me the sights today. I am more than willing to sit around and talk about her father all day, but she wanted to go out and not think about anything for a while.

Winnipeg is similar to Minneapolis in a lot of ways. It is about the same size and has pretty much the same geography. Winnipeg is at the Red River/Assiniboine River junction with more than a few large and small lakes nearby and a couple of really big lakes out the back door. Minneapolis is at the Mississippi/Minnesota River junction and is completely surrounded by lakes, including a couple of Great Lakes. We get more rain and snow than they do, but our weather is pretty much the same. People assume that both cities are frozen tundras, but they both get hot in summer and more humid than outlanders expect. I used to think our summers were very humid before I moved to Hong Kong.

Winnipeg has a skywalk system that connects a few dozen buildings downtown. Whichever downtown buildings have no skywalk are connected by an underground tunnel. Naturally, part of the tunnel is a shopping mall. The Minneapolis Skyway is 11 miles of bridges that connect I don't know how many different buildings over 69 blocks. You can get to pretty much everything there is to see downtown without ever going outdoors. My first apartment was directly connected to a bank, hotel, Catholic school and the YMCA. I could almost walk to school without ever leaving the skyway. Up until I reached the school itself. Then I just had to cross the street.

Just like Minneapolis, Winnipeg has plenty of parks, especially near the river, and a million things to do and see outdoors, in winter or summer. This has been the coldest day of my visit by far, but it stopped snowing. The locals did not care how cold it was. The sun was out, so to them, this was the perfect day to go outdoors. Winnipeg, like Minneapolis, is a great place to go outdoors the second the snow stops.