Seattle

Home to Boeing, Microsoft and Starbucks and often ranked as the best city to live in the USA, Seattle is a big place but just like in many of the individual States, the big city isn’t the capital.  That’s Olympia, of which more later.  Not much more but later anyway.

As we park the car in a multi-storey a block away from our hotel for a couple of days while we’re here, we note that we’ve covered about 3,000 miles in 18 days, all on the wrong side of the road.  It was ok though, everyone else was on the wrong side too.  Our hotel was in the perfect location for a quick visit, being within a couple of blocks of Pike Place Market on the waterfront.  See that’s one film title I’ve slipped in there.  Everything we wanted to see was within about a mile.  The hotel café even had a real fireplace with a fire which on closer inspection was a television set showing a fire on a loop.  Pumpkin seems to be used for everything you could imagine and more here.  Said hotel café had a sign suggesting we might like to try a ‘pumpkin or eggnog latte’, which I think was some sort of coffee abomination.

Pike Place is a lively and raucous place, an odd mix of complete tourist stuff and a real market.  After all, most tourists are unlikely to buy lots of fish even though at least one stall entertains the tourists, throwing the fish about and all four or five sellers singing when a piece of fish is sold.  They also have a big Monkfish right at the front which has a piece of rope attached so that whenever someone is close a quick tweak makes the fish and the someone jump.  The currently oldest but not the original Starbucks is here and has a constant queue snaking along the pavement outside.   There are fabulously stocked fruit stalls, juice stands, yogurt shops (really delicious) and one thing I’ve never seen before.  This is a cheese making shop with the vat of curds or whey or whatever on one side making the cheese and a shop selling it on the other.  Newt tells me there are lots of artisan cheese makers around although we’ve never come across them but this place was making really good cheese, with free samples too!   The whole market area had a quite European feel really, you could easily picture it in France or Italy.  

Seattle has a really good public transport system with one ticket for $2.50 covering as many journeys as you can fit into about 5 hours.  The drivers aren’t too bothered about the timing and once when I had the necessary five dollars in ones I was just waved through with “that’s ok” after I’d put two dollars in the machine.

One sight strongly associated with Seattle is the Space Needle, built in the early 1960s and from the top of which you can have a high level view of the city.  Fortunately it isn’t in the centre of downtown because if it was it would be dwarfed by a lot of the high rise buildings.  For our high level view we went up the Columbia Center which stands 932 feet high with the 73^rd floor being the observation level.   We had a clear sunny day and could see across the harbour westwards towards the Olympic Peninsula, southwards to the snowy cap of Mt Rainier and northwards and downwards to the Space Needle whose observation deck is at about 500 feet.   The city and harbour lay spread out below and it was a magnificent sight.  We could even look down and watch a helicopter way below us arriving at the hospital where some staff took a not very hurried stroll across to unload whichever unfortunate was on board.

Bonnie was aware of a gallery displaying glass ware by someone called Dale Chiluly which to my mind turned out to be the best part of our visit to Seattle.  This was mind blowing, not just glass blowing stuff and the work on display really could be described as masterpieces.  Many were multiple individual pieces, some ten or more feet high, another one as a glass garden looking like a reef from underwater must have been 50 feet or so long.  Multi-coloured, multi-shaped and a lot of it pretty weird but my goodness he knew what he was doing.  It was an astounding collection although I did think that for some of it at least it was more than caffeine that was sparking his imagination.   This tremendous exhibition was put into even better perspective by the joke that was called the Olympic Sculpture Park for which my only comment is that just because nobody understands what you’re doing doesn’t make you an artist.

Anyone who has read these notes of mine before will know that I enjoy a good/bad pun so I was particularly taken by a restaurant called The Grill from Impanema.  In the oldest part of town Pioneer Square, we saw the old Smith typewriter building and the Smith in question was apparently the same man as in Smith & Wesson but I promised Heather that I wouldn’t say I’d learned to type on a 45 calibre typewriter.

This Pioneer Square end of town was also a poor and in places run down location although there were also some very upmarket parts of it too.  This area had the largest number of homeless people on the street that we’d seen so far with tents set up in clusters, some alongside buildings on the pavement, something we’d never seen before.  More beggars than anywhere else too.  There were a few tents also set up on a small patch of grass at one end of Pike Place.

We were in Seattle for the first Presidential debate which we just had to watch.  We got some drink in, some Mac ‘n Cheese (a pasta dish for English speakers) from the cheese factory in Pike Street and settled down to watch.  Why the moderator, poor to my mind for not taking control, didn’t have a switch to turn off a microphone I don’t know.  Trump is a repulsive man and the sooner he’s flushed into the sewer where he belongs, the better.  Hopefully, his tax, business and abuse of women will be properly investigated by the relevant authorities but I imagine if they were it would be claimed to be ‘political’.  I can just see him claiming to be ‘a political prisoner’.  The whole appalling business concerning the election to one of the most important positions in the world is like watching a train crash in slow motion.    

Sadly this is where we wave goodbye to Bonnie and Newt who fly home to Gloucester, Massachusetts after what for us has been the most enjoyable two weeks.  True, we now have the whole boot to ourselves and we’ll now have to do all the driving (no, something not right there but I can’t quite put my finger on it).  Although we met in India and have been friends for six or seven years we haven’t actually really seen a great deal of each other but it feels as if we’ve know each other forever.  We are very lucky.

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