Seattle, USA
11-09-07: G’day From WA (Washington, That Is!)
The bus trip to Seattle was pretty nondescript. We woke early, spelt a little on the bus. The border crossing was way tamer than we thought it would be – the guards were friendly enough (although being fingerprinted was a novelty).
Seattle itself is a really lovely city – very art deco and clean. Like everywhere that has clean streets and blue skies, it reminded us so Perth. We wandered the streets a little before catching the monorail (built for the 60s World Fair where the mobile phone and microwave oven were introduced). It’s a 5/10 minutes trip, and you go through the music/sci-fi museum that Paul Allen (co-founded of Microsoft) founded .
We were hoping to have lunch at Sky City (the restaurant at the top of the Space Needle), but we got there a few minutes too late. We wandered instead to a pizza joint off Denny Way (which is not technically a ‘way’, as it’s a main road!) called Zeek’s. We ordered a medium pizza each. We got to Australian equivalent of a large pizza each, plus dipping sauce. We couldn’t finish our meal. We felt sick. Well, I did. I was so full we had to go back to the hotel and just lie there, moaning and feeling sorry for ourselves. And that was our first day in Seattle.
Well, not quite. Tim picked us up around 7pm and we went back to his place (collecting his colleague, Pete, on the way). There we met his girlfriend, Colleen, and then walked to a local brewery where we were joined by his housemate, Chris, and his girlfriend, Rhoda. The night was spent chatting and eating (although we didn’t eat because we were still too full from the pizza!). After dinner, we went to Hooters, where it was less tacky and more disturbing than anticipated. The girls were conventionally attractive, but the upsetting aspect was not their boobs, but their youth coupled with their hot pants. Chuck in half a dozen leering middle-aged nutters, and you have Hooters. Our waitress had a voice like a mouse. And they had no wine, so I had to have this foul raspberry-vodka concoction. Awesome. We were joined by Janlick, a fellow Microsoft employee and ex-Perthian, but didn’t stay for too long as it was late, and we were tired.
12-09-07: Second Day In Seattle
We arose fairly late on our second (and last) day in Seattle, only to discover that it was an overcast day. We walked to the needle, decided the weather was irrelevant since the revolving restaurants windows are tinted, and so we went up for an early lunch. The restaurant itself was really nice and is certainly worth visiting. The city is not very beautiful, though, particularly considering that you’re actually seated inside the coolest piece of architecture in Seattle!!
After lunch (I had a delicious halibut and James had the salmon, and we started with a goat cheese tart), we visited the Science Fiction museum (much cooler than and more thorough than expected, with an emphasis on novels which was really neat). The music museum seemed lame in comparison, until we discovered the ‘jam’ room, where we played instruments and giggled excessively playing with various settings in the ‘vocal’ room.
After this, we walked into town to do some shopping. The shopping wasn’t as amazing as we’d hoped, so we walked to Capitol Hill in search of a bookstore we’d heard about the day before. We walked about six blocks in the wrong direction before finally asking and finding it.
The bookstore was called ‘Twice Sold Tales’ and is famous for having half a dozen cats wandering the aisles. There were four resident cats and three kittens, I sat on the floor at one point to get a closer look at the books, and immediately a big fat cat made a beeline for me and jumped into my lap!!
I bought about five books and met James in a cocktail bar on the corner called Blue, which was really unique and cool (it had tables individualised with curtains and an amazing selection of cocktails).
Tim joined us at 8pm, and we first walked to a Mexican food bar, then back to Tim’s where we drove (across a floating bridge!) to Microsoft. The tour was brief, but we got a good idea of Microsoft’s campus feel, and what Tim’s day-to-day work life is life (pretty sweet, it seems!).
Tim dropped us back at the hotel (after a detour to a good look-out point for seeing the Seattle skyline), where we said our last goodnight to him and to Seattle.