People have covered most of the stuff. I'll try and cover some of the stuff that got missed.
Valleyfair: An
amusement park down in Shakopee. Not far from the cities.
I think the race track (Canterbury) is still in operation, but it is always struggling.
We've had quite a few casinos pop up. I've never been in them (don't want to even start gambling), so I can't comment on how good they are.
When you live here, you will hear lots of people talk about 'going up north to the cabin for the weekend.' There are a lot of nice areas north of the cities for camping, fishing, snowmobiling, cross-country skiing, and such. The Boundary Waters Canoe Area (BWCA) is lovely, so is the North Shore of the Great Lakes. Lots of people like to go up to these areas, especially in the fall as the leaves are changing.
Bookstores are everywhere. We have two of the best used book stores in the nation -- Uncle Hugo's and Dreamhaven Books. Dreamhaven gets more business from games since it is across the street from Pheonix Games, but both are worth visiting.
Food often suffers from Minnesota Bland. I'm a native of the state, BTW. Some people here do consider ketchup a spice. There are places where you can convince the cooks to actually put some zing in the food, most of them run by Hmong, but by default you have to order something extra spicy just to get some flavor.
Avoid ludefisk. Really, the stuff is absolutely vile. If someone trys to get you to go to Mora or Cambridge for some, politely decline. There are other swedish and norwegian dishes that are good, just avoid the ludefisk.
The last couple of years have been harsh as far as finding work, but that is slowly recovering. We have a lot of little tech companies here, and most of the older engineers here worked for CDC or Unisys at one time or another.
I'm sure there are other things I'm forgetting about, hopefully someone else will fill in with them.
