About a week and half-ish ago, we talked about the first five things that make Minnesota a special place. Now we’re back with the remaining five.

6. Hot Dish. AKA casserole. At least that’s what most of us who are not from Minnesota call this. (Although apparently, while every hotdish is a casserole, not every casserole is a hot dish.) Whatever. Your basic dish “constructed on a base of canned cream of mushroom soup and canned vegetables.” The question is, do you want to eat this?

7. Co-ops. OK. This is a little tricky, since it’s not like Minnesota invented co-ops, or is the only place that has them. Let’s just be real. There are pros and cons to joining and shopping at a co-op; we just like to poke fun at the fact that it feels like it costs $25.93 for some peanut butter. And the way our budgets are set up…

8. The Lynx. Or as you might know them, the winningest sports team in Minnesota. Here at TeamBlackasotan, we love the Lynx. If we waited on the men’s sports teams to receive accolades, well, we’d be as old as Methuselah.

9. Interracial dating. We have read all kinds of statistics that we can’t confirm or deny, i.e., 44% of black married men in MN are married to non-black women, and 14% of black married women are married to non-black men. Nothing that we’ve been able to find really provides a comprehensive overview of race and dating in Minnesota; most studies seem outdated, and only seem to reference cisgender, heterosexual, monogamous couples. Everybody has a different opinion on interracial dating, but it would be foolish to pretend like anecdotally, the narrative that many of us hear is that Minnesota seems like one of the interracial dating hotspots in the nation.

10. Prince. Get a bunch of transplants together, and we all have stories to tell about our relatives back home asking if we ever got to see or meet Prince. What – we were just supposed to see him buying plums at the local Cub? Most of us, sadly, never shared space with His Royal Badness.

Tell us about some of the unique things you’ve experienced as a Blackasotan.