About- Minneapolis is the largest city in Minnesota and the county seat of Hennepin County. It adjoins Saint Paul, the state's capital and second-largest city. Together they form the core of the Twin Cities metropolitan area, the 15th-largest agglomeration in the country (and roughly 65th-largest in the world), with about three million residents. In the 2000 census, the city itself had a total population of 382,618, making it the 47th-largest city in the United States. Note that if the two core cities themselves were combined together in the census, the resulting "city" would rank 17th, just between Louisville, Kentucky and Austin, Texas.

The city is in the southeast portion of the state and sits along the Mississippi River. There are also 24 small lakes in the city. This led Charles Hoag, an early settler and Minneapolis's first schoolmaster, to suggest a name derived from minne, the Dakota word for water, and polis, the Greek word for city. Other names considered at the time were Brooklyn and Albion. The city is also known as the "City of Lakes", a phrase that appears on many municipal vehicles and properties.

Sports & Rec- Minneapolis has a large park system consisting of ten square miles (26 km²) of land and water that is interlinked in many places. The Grand Rounds Scenic Byway circles through the city and brings together many of the bigger park areas including land along the Mississippi River, many of the city's lakes, and other scenic areas of the city. The route has a parkway for cars (not a freeway—literally just a roadway through park land, though the number of stops is reduced), a bikeway for riders, and a walkway for pedestrians all running in roughly parallel paths along the 50-mile route. It is the first natural scenic byway totally located in a major urban area. Additional routes in the Minneapolis park system criss-cross the city, and the number of bikeways and walkways continues to grow. They also interconnect with neighboring cities.