Seattle

On Thursday we departed Victoria, BC on the Clipper heading for Seattle.

Unfortunately there had been wildfires in British Columbia which has meant that it has been a bit too fuggy (Although when we smelt burning we figured it had something to do with the football) and it meant that the views from the Clipper were not as good as hoped. However I would definitely recommend it as a mode of transport if you are in this part of the world. It felt like travel in the 1930's: plush leather seats and lots of leg room..

Seattle sits on the Puget Sound and in fact the whole area around the city is made up of a number of islands. We were chatting away to a couple on the Clipper who live on one of the islands and they pointed out the various places as we passed, so it was like having our own private guides. My local government geekiness was indulged by our discussions about taxes and the changing community. I was told that a lot of their community has now changed to vacation rentals from holiday homes, a la Cornwall.

Seattle was quite high on the list of places to visit for 13 year old me. Grown up me isn't really interested in hipster bands and to be honest I didn't find Seattle as trendy a place as thought. In fact it felt just like a city which is synonymous with Starbucks, Microsoft, Amazon and Boeing -  85,000 people are still employed here by the latter.

Bit of history that I gleaned from our walking tour with Jake from SFWT: Seattle was named after the Chief of the local tribe, who was apparently a good egg.  Naturally the colonists ended up killing a load of his tribe and forcing the rest onto a reservation. Moving on..

Seattle found it's fortune through logging as the area was covered with thousand year old trees. So they logged like it was going out of fashion...which it duly did 'cause they ran out of thousand year old trees. Apparently there are fewer than a dozen of those old trees left. While they did bring prosperity to Seattle, many of those trees died for naught as in 1889 there a fire started in a glue factory and 33 square blocks of wooden buildings in the city were razed.

The city was not doing too well at all until gold was discovered about 1800 miles away in the Yukon peninsula. Seattle -through the PR genius of a guy called Erastus Brainard- set itself up as the gateway to Klondike and the city boomed. We visited the Klondike National Park in Seattle, which is actually a modest indoor museum, despite the grandiose title. The most interesting thing was learning about some of the women that also headed up there. Enterprising, clever brave and kick-ass women who made the journey and set up restaurants and guest houses or went prospecting themselves.
If you have visited the States , you might have gone to Nordstrom department stores? The founder John Nordstrom made some money in the Klondike gold rush and invested it in his first retail enterprise. Although it was tough, I can see how it captured peoples imagination at the time. Although the City of Seattle made far more money than all of the prospectors combined, from supplying said prospectors with provisions...especially after the Canadian Police said that anyone going to the area had to have enough supplies for a year.

We stayed at the Hotel Five. Very modern. Has a cupcake happy hour every day. We have trekked around the city, visiting Pike Place Market and sampling coffee (or I have been watching G drink it as my non-alcohol tolerance is low). Mondays through Fridays in Seattle from about 3-6 are happy hours in most bars and restaurants. This means that a lot of food and drink is half price if you catch it right. We therefore decided to do some restaurant hopping instead of traditional dinner, drinking and snacking and moving on to the next happy hour. This meant our evenings were actually free. So we went to the Cinema (aside before the movie after the bit about not being a phone pest, they told us where all the exits were and to let them know if anyone was acting suspiciously. I always find it so tough to marry up that America with all my experiences so far) and also went to the Olympic Sculpture Park.

The weather has been early to mid twenties but that darn fugginess has meant that we were not able to spot Mt Ranier, although we have been assured by many locals that it does actually exist.

Today we went for Brunch at the Space Needle. It is a revolving restaurant. Jolly good stuff.

Sleep-resistant in Seattle

So we've been in Seattle for the last couple of days and now we're at the airport Hilton, as tomorrow we're picking up a car for the first 'road trip' element of the jaunt.  Chan wants to write about the general touristy stuff in Seattle, so it remains to me to talk about the town's best export that didn't peer down the wrong end of a twelve-gauge.

This here is the first ever Starbucks:

Sack that

In case you are somehow unaware, Starbucks are the main reason that espresso-based coffee drinks are now vended -very nearly literally- on every urban street corner in the developed world.  Whether you consider that a good thing is another discussion, but it certainly suits my proclivities and daringly avant-garde approach to sleep regularity. Regardless, it's a place of caffeine-dealing significance and so I stopped to take a picture, considered grabbing a brew and then promptly considered not doing that as there was a 90 minute wait to be served.  

An hour and a half.  

Bollocks, more like.  In that time I would've hit withdrawal, gone cold turkey, visited regular support groups and gone on to become a productive member of society.  So we bimbled around town, trying out the home turf competition. 'We' being largely 'me'.

Tully's

It's alright

Tully's started with the rather amusing strategy of building a competing branch next to every new branch of Starbucks and then playing off of local brand loyalty to win business. A bold approach that took them 14 years to turn a profit and then another 6 to go bankrupt.  They were then bought out by a group of investors led by Patrick Dempsey (of grittily-portrayed neurosurgeon in Grey's Anatomy fame) just because. They also spell their large cup size veinte, which is nice.  There's no telling them that fluid ounces don't make any damn sense, though.

Top Pot Doughnuts

The focus of this place is more on the dough-fried-in-rendered-pig front, as the name suggests.  Evidently this place is a bit of a local phenomenon as we were queuing for twenty minutes, first thing in the day.  This isn't too bad as it gives you chance to choose the means of your arteries' destruction.

"You have chosen....wisely"  *clutches left arm*

The beverage with the ice floating in it is 'Cold Brewed' coffee.  I saw the like in Canada also, so it may well be something widespread and coffee-based that somehow has passed under my radar (presumably at night and close to the treeline), but it involves steeping ground coffee in cold water for a day or more to produce a sweeter, less acidic version of iced coffee.  If they've got the time, I've got the money, I guess.

Zeitgeist

It means 'Spirit of the time' by the way.

The coffee was good, the food was gluten-free and the MacBooks were knee-deep.  The bearclaw we had as a substitute for the one we didn't find at Tully's was a bit lame, though.

Starbucks Reserve

To be honest, I did not know this place existed until we happened on it.  It's a big coffee shop/gift shop/pie shop thing. All the coffee and accoutrements you'll ever need at only double the price.  I tried some free samples of some Vietnamese coffee and then left.  Smash the state, comrade.

Bauhaus

Also a German name; a bit more tolerable this time. 

Another German name.  This time it's referring to a famous school of art and design which heavily influenced German modernism. I'm fun at parties.  In reality it's a quirky place filled with students and it's walls are lined with books and terrible horror cartoon artwork. Apparently genuine writers come here to work in the loft, and you can believe it too as it has that 'I'm working and not dicking about on facebook' vibe to it.

Espresso Vivace.

This place is famous for selling specifically Northern-Italian espresso and for having a naff lino floor and stand-up bar, serving the street.  It's great.  I had a Caffe Nico, principally because I had no idea what it was.  It involved a double espresso, something other than milk being steamed, zest from an orange and some manner of dark incantation to things that ought not be meddled with by man. It would doubtless be my 'thing' were I to live here.

Kurzfassung auf Deutsch:  Ich habe so viel Kaffee getrunken, dass ich durch Zeit und Raum zu sehen kann.