Weekend in Seattle

I don't think I've ever been on a connecting flight to/from Toronto that has left on time. Our flight from Toronto to Seattle was delayed for what felt like forever, as we waited on the tarmac. "Never start your vacation with Toronto," groaned my husband. I passed the time by reading Guillermo del Toro's The Strain, which, in case you were wondering, is a book that begins with everyone dying on a plane while waiting on the tarmac.

Eventually we arrived in the magical land of Seattle, a city I haven't been to in seven years. I also hadn't been in the United States in a year and a half since my last vacation in Portland - perhaps subconsciously we were trying to avoid the chaos of the American election campaigns (and also the weak Canadian dollar). Maybe it was because we arrived in the middle of the night, but America felt like a foreign country again, with its weird incomprehensible measurements in miles and Fahrenheit, and startlingly simply signs that did not have any French translations.

I wondered if we'd find any good coffee?

We checked into the City Hostel, which oddly enough has the same logo as the fascist villain organization Hydra from Marvel Comics. It also had pretty but unusual mural art on the walls. And seagulls that screeched like monkeys outside our window in an otherwise quiet alley.

Downtown was, as my resident friend E explained, filled with waddling midwesterners waiting for their cruises to Alaska to start. Seattle's waterfront has a decidedly industrial look to it. It's a major shipping spot, shipping not just cruise customers but all sorts of goods. Amazon, after all is based here.

 

Despite its industrial look, Seattle is brimming with amazing restaurants, bars, breweries, and every hip thing that a young person could ask for. Its arts news publication The Stranger advertised artisanal marijuana edibles and a talk by Carrie Brownstein at the Seattle Art Fair. Also a workshop on cannabis and sex, and how to incorporate cannabis lube products, a topic I have never been curious about before, and to be honest, still am not. But Dan Savage lives here. If you don't want to go to a Hemp Fest, you can go to his Hump Fest. If you're not into any of that, there are the punk record stores, or the famous monorail that doesn't seem to go anywhere useful. Pretty impressive for a city of some 650,000 - even smaller than Ottawa!

Oh yeah, and the International DOTA championships were happening here that weekend. What wasn't happening in Seattle?

Chewing gum alley: the most disgusting tourist attraction ever

Outside was refreshing cool, a lovely 20 degrees compared to the 40 humidex Ottawa has been dealing with. It was nice to be able to put on a pair of jeans again with feeling like I was going to melt with sweat Seattle's weather seems to be a running joke with the city - they even have a restaurant called Damn the Weather. But we didn't mind. Even though it would sometimes rain without warning, it was refreshlingly cool, the perfect weather for us.

We explored the Pike Place Market, a tourist staple for Seattle. The fish market was particularly fascinating. So many different kinds of fish I had never seen before, and some of them of unbelievable sizes. We saw the famous singing seafood vendors, singing their orders while they threw their fish across the stands to package for their customers. I stared wide-eyed at the enormous monkfish...and screamed when its jaw suddenly started flapping! The vendor was teasing me by making it move.

And of course, we found some coffee. The first Starbucks coffee location ever opened in fact. There were long lines around the block to get into the shop. We waited, because we're suckers, and ordered the Pike Place reserve blend. We watched in fascination as they individually dripped each order (which may partly explain the long lines). I apologized to the barista for taking a photo, as the whole preparation method seemed like quite the spectacle. "That's okay," she said cheerily. "I'm wearing new lipstick today."

"What the heck is this line for?" I heard a Korean tourist ask her friend in Korean.

We also enjoyed the Starbucks Roastery. It was just nice to sit and relax while watching the hypnotic motions of the roasting machines, stirring the beans, pushing them through the pneumatic tubes across the room. I'm not a coffee connoisseur but I like watching people make things that they are passionate about. It certainly looked like sorcery, the mysterious chemical process that the baristas busily worked on. I don't get it. But it was tasty.

 

Perhaps fuelled by too much coffee, I had strange dreams that night, prompted by the sounds of the street below. Saturday night crowds yelling drunkenly while they spilled out of the bar at closing time; some restaurant employee apparently disposing of an entire China plate set. And the seagulls.

Sunday morning we woke up to the usual screeching of seagulls that serve as Seattle's rooster wake up call and there was a mysterious pile of poo on the sidewalk outside our hostel. It mystified me. Couldn't possibly be human...or at least just one human. How did it get there? Who left it there?

We decided to check out the famous EMP Museum, housed in the impressive architectural complex designed by Frank Gehry. The building was somewhat controversial when it first went up, but I find it fascinating that it seems bigger than the eye can handle. There are so many parts to it, and because of its enormous size, you can't really see all of it at once.

I also really liked the musical playground that was outside the EMP, and spent a lot of time playing on the musical structures, probably a lot longer than a grown woman without children should be on a playground.

The museum itself also had a lot of awesome stuff. Exhibits about Jimi Hendrix and Nirvana, as well as a guitar gallery. An interactive poll collected people's votes on the best breakup song (The Pokémon theme song was in the lead for some reason). It also had a jam session exhibit, where you could play around on guitars, keyboards, and drums, which was pretty exciting until I remembered that I have those things at home. There was a cool fashion exhibit called "WEARABLEART" which, I am told, is "wearable art" and not "wear a bleart" like I had read it.

Upon our friends' recommendations, we did the Seattle Underground Tour, where we learned all about Seattle's "underground" history. Did you know, for example, that the original downtown Seattle was burned down in a fire that was started by a mistake by an apprentice who probably felt like a total goof after all that? It was fascinating to wander through the bowels of Seattle.

We finished the evening having drinks with my friend E, who moved back to Seattle after we had both gone to the University of Amsterdam together for a semester.  We met up at Jarrbar, a cute bar in a converted garage in the Pike Place Market strip. It was pretty much my ideal kind of bar, perfect for people watching, offering cheap drinks and snacks, playing Washed Out on the stereo and The Fifth Element on the TV screen. It just felt so very Seattle.

In the end, Rob and I agreed that we had a hard time figuring out whether we liked Portland or Seattle better. Clearly the American Northwest suits us well, and we'll just have to spend more time here.

 

Seattle for the sake of Seattle

I started my morning off grabbing a tall Americano from the first Starbucks ever established, across the street from my building. Wandered the Pike Market just because it was close by, determined not to fall into any of the tourist traps but found this cute shop where they sold some re-worked vintage dresses from material as far as Nepal and the Himalayas. it provoked an interesting question: a saree, reworked into a skirt. is it offensive to muslims or cool? i decided to leave that decision for another day.

one of the guys working at the hostel struck up a conversation with me that kind of continued in bits and pieces over the entire weekend. he told me that most people staying in Seattle are just passing through, either on their way north to Vancouver or south to California. He said nobody really comes to Seattle for the sake of Seattle. it's not an international city like New York or Paris or London.

this surprised me. i feel like there are plenty of reasons to go to Seattle for Seattle itself. it's a West Coast city, but with a much more bad ass vibe than, say, sunny Portland or hippie Vancouver. the entire grunge movement was homegrown here, in this one city. Jimi Hendrix was buried around here. a whole host of musicians passed through this city, where history was made. I think this is what i like about American cities, which, unlike most Canadian cities, have this amazing deep sense of history in it. Canadian cities, for the most part, are small and young, even for North America, and what is exciting about them is what is happening now, what is developing now, and the exciting promise of the future. American cities, on the other hand, have a past. they struggled through growing pains of war and race and a different ideology that Canada did not experience, and through that grew an arts culture that reflected on it.

i love to travel, and my favourite thing to do is to walk through a city that i've never seen before but read all about. i walk down and look at the buildings and i can practically smell and taste the history, the set of memories and experiences of someone else's life, another community, another world. i may never intend to move there but there is the feeling, the possibility that here i am in a new world and i have a new life. i love that feeling and i can never have enough.



i went to the Experience Music Project, which is probably one of the best places i could have gone to explore Seattle, simply because there was an exhibit devoted entirely to the development of popular music in the Northwest. Housed in its incredible Frank Gehry-designed building, there were pictures and videos and displays explaining the stories of the bands there, starting from jazz to r&b to 60s garage rock to metal to punk to grunge to Harvey Danger (hahaha). i loved it. i just drank it all in. i was disappointed that i couldn't take any pictures, because there were so many amazing things there. there was an entire exhibit devoted to the history of guitars: they had a Gibson from the 1800s.

what also won my heart was the Sound Lab. it's just a bunch of rooms set up to let you explore instruments. at first, i was like meh, i own like five guitars and already know how to play the piano. but i realized that it is a great opportunity for non-musicians to learn how to play instruments in a non-intimidating setting (like in a music store where some middle-aged ponytail will accuse you of not looking like a slide guitar player because you're a petite Asian girl). also, they had other stations set up so i acquainted myself with the basics of sampling, mixing, and turntabling - all things that no one has ever bothered to teach me before. that was pretty damn cool.

also: the Experience Music Project was connected to the Science Fiction Museum. i cannot express how much i enjoyed the science fiction museum. i had my notebook out the whole time, trying to write down the names of books i've got to check out next until i was forced to finally give up. there was a whole section on robots! yessss. everybody who knows me knows that i am a big nerd, but i was unnecessarily aroused at the science fiction museum.

the Experience Music Project had a Jimi Hendrix display, including the strat guitar on which he played the famous Spar Spangled Banner at Woodstock. I feel like you had to be there, or else have someone else tell you what it was like and you have to believe them. you know, that's the problem with being born so late. You spend half your life trying to catch up on what you missed. you chase after place after place and dream about what it must have been like to be there when it mattered: to be in Washington as the riot grrrl scene roared to life. to be in Woodstock when Jimi performed. to be in toronto, in that room when the concept of Broken Social Scene was born. to be in Montreal, during the explosion of post rock. i guess that's all right, as long as you remember to spend the other half of your life catching the scene that is happening right there, right then.

those that know me well know that i have a hard time staying in one place, doing one thing. nobody has ever asked me before what drives me, but there is is. it's the frustratingly finite physical limits of life. i can't do everything and be everywhere. there is so much to see and do and not enough time.

green tortoise hostel

every time people ask me where i'm from, i give a different answer. sometimes i say toronto, sometimes i say vancouver, sometimes i say ottawa (if they seem like the kind of person who knows where that is. someone yesterday didn't recognize toronto).

i'm pretty impressed with Green Tortoise Hostel i'm staying at. maybe i'm not so old; i love hostel life. this one is particularly impressive. it's got free breakfast and free internet, and even a smoking room for the smokers. each bed has its own privacy curtains and its own fan and light. and the location just can't be beat, right next to pike place market and across the street from the first starbucks ever built.

last night, the guy at the front desk invited me to have a glass of wine with him, so i sat down and talked with him. he told me about how hé's spending his time going back and forth seasonally between the two coasts according to his needs. New York, for the money, and the West Coast for the awesome relaxation our mental health so badly needs. what a life. then i joined some other folks watching the Princess Bride in the lounge. that movie is *timeless*.

happy 50th birthday, Thurston Moore, i took a beating for you

going to a sonic youth concert is apparently a bit like having a thousand people make love to you at the same time. i don't mean it in the sense of a bunch of people simultaneously enjoying themselves, although i suppose that's probably true too. i mean it more in the sense, especially when you're front row and centre, a thousand people are pressing up against you and you find random (girls'!) arms around your waist for inexplicable reasons and you find your dress is being pulled off just from the sheer pressure.

and then i got kicked in the face. that's not normal bedroom behaviour i think, but i can tell you that it's swollen and it hurts like hell. i felt my neck go craaaaack and the next thing i knew, i was bleeding. after the (drunk) guy left i screamed a long string of curses after him with a vehemence that probably surprised all the people around me who thought i was a nice polite Canadian girl. the thought ran across my mind that maybe i'm getting old for rock concerts, but i look on the stage and remember that both kim gordon and thurston moore are older than my parents and still rocking out, so i refuse to accept that i at twenty-four am too old for rock. but maybe my rocking out is going to have to be restricted to either hanging out far back...or being on stage. because dammit, it hurts to breathe right now.

freedom

made it to seattle. it took all day. i am now in the land of freedom, and i just ate a freedom burger. McDonalds are the same everywhere you go, except here they have a slight flavour of liberty. i've been here like an hour and i've already been propositioned twice, and got to witness a fight break out in the McDonalds. I see my random outburts of feminist rants will probably not do well here, not that they went over well during my yoga classes on Kits beach at the random cat-callers.

i think i'm going to make it an early tonight tonight. i know i'm lame. tomorrow i'll explore this magical city where department store buildings look like hotels and botox ads are everywhere.

this is the seattle starbucks logo i was talking about

scandalous!

hard core american music

if you've been following my travel blog long enough, you know one of my favourite things to see when i travel is street music.



i could have listened to these guys for hours.

surprise trip to seattle

My uncle said, “Why don’t you take the bus to Portland? It’s cheaper.”

I said, “Taking the bus is for poor people. I’m taking the Amtrak train.”

As it turns out, the Amtrak route to cross the US-Canadian border is a bus, and what should be a four hour trip by car has turned into a twelve hour one, thank you US Customs. Thank God its been a pleasant day mostly overall. The Canadian Border Services Agency is one of our main clients at work, so I spend a lot of time drafting legal advice about border issues, so I know how much power border officials wield and how strict they could be. This led me to pull a Liz Lemon, wolfing down my sandwich as fast as I could before customs officials could confiscate my “smuggled” food. Unfortunately, it’s the long weekend, and every single Canadian wants to spend the Queen’s day in the States, so there was a massive hold up at the Customs border. That left me with two hours to wait in a crowded bus and hold my pee while feeling pretty nauseous from eating greasy sandwiches too quickly. Mmm.

It was all made up with a delicious coffee at the first Starbucks that was built 1971), in Seattle. Let me explain something first: I wasn’t supposed to be in Seattle. I was supposed to be on a train to Portland. But thanks to the good people at the border, and every other vacationing Canadian, I missed my connecting train and found myself stranded in Seattle with three hours to kill. Not that it’s there aren’t worse places to kill time.

As I stepped out of the King Street Station, I felt the warm sunshine hit my skin and thought, “Crap. I am screwed.” Because I had left all planning everything to the last minute, I did not have a single American cent in my pocket. I asked a man at a Tourist Information booth, who told me there was no currency exchange place except on Pike Street. I am pretty sure this was a lie and a ploy to drive me into the tourist distict.

At any rate it worked. As I rode on Seattle’s (FREE!) public transit buses, it occurred to me that I only had to find an ATM to take out American cash. By that time, I was already halfway to the Pike Market. Oh well The first place that I found an ATM was a strip club. For once in my life I exercised my judgment and decided to go for the second ATM I found – conveniently located right next to the world’s first Starbucks in the Pike Market. It’s definitely worth checking out, for anyone in Seattle, if not just because of the fact that this location has the original Starbucks logo. Not many people realize that the double-tailed mermaid logo we are familiar with today is very, very, very edited (read: BOOBS).

After I treated myself to some bobo booby corporate coffee, I strolled through the Pike market. I love Seattle for the sole reason that there seemed to be a Food & Wine Festival going on at the time with many, many, many free samples, mostly cheese-based. Yessssss. I found another Starbucks (my total Starbucks count during my three hour stint in Seattle was about eight), in front of four old black men were serenading the crowds with old school Motown songs a cappella. I bought myself some roasted corn on the cob and sat at the harbourfront listening. You know, we all love to hate America, but there are pieces of American culture that I can’t help loving. Starbucks. Motown. Corn. Fat, friendly Texan tourists that call you ma’am. The weather was beautiful and sunny, and I decided to walk all the way back from the Pike Market to the Pioneer Square to the station.

the train ride to portland was odd. The car next to us was full of drunk middle-aged people who stop everyone that passes through on the way to the dining car to sing Happy Birthday. Then they demand a speech. For me, they decided to sing Van Morrison’s “Gloria”. Everyone that emerges from the car has this flushed smile on their face. I wonder if I will be like that, drunk and happy, when I am old.

am in the travelodge now. was thinking about going to the jazz bar nearby, but i saw that it was karaoke night, and i'm tired from, er, sitting on public transit for thirteen hours. tomorrow i begin exploring the city of roses. till then i sign off with the train conductor's message:

"Thank you for choosing Amtrak. Chickadee China, the Chinese Chicken."