Seattle

I feel kind of strange posting about my time in the States. Travel in my home country doesn't feel like it should count as travel at all. I guess I'll compromise and just keep it short.

Security leaving Canada was far kinder than getting into it had been, though no faster. I got into the city in the early evening and stayed with some awesome couch surf hosts. I truly felt at home there. It helped that their neighborhood had the same architectural styles as the ones I love in Portland, but mostly it was that they were friendly, intelligent, quirky people. They fed me dinner and took me out to a party across town. 

The next day my main host took me on a pleasant walk through Seward Park. I went to China town and hung out there for a while until meeting up with the next night's host. We talked about mixed martial arts and East Asia. 

In the morning I wandered around the Washington Park Arboretum, which was in full bloom. I then met up with my host for the next two nights. While eating eggs Benedict with salmon, we compared my experiences in Korea with his in his native Taiwan, discussed his life and studies at the University of Washington as well as places worth seeing in Seattle. After brunch I walked towards downtown, but on my host's helpful suggestion I stopped in Gasworks Park.

The former gasworks has been converted into a lovely outdoor space, with enough machinery left behind to make it distinctive and a fun setting for many a child's imagined epics. The park also offers a great view of the Seattle skyline, and apparently great wind currents for kites.

Further on my walk was the Freemont Troll, which was the single greatest piece of evidence for my suspicion that I would be nearly as happy in Seattle as I am in Portland.

My walk through the Queen Anne neighborhood a bit strenuous, but the views were worth the trek up the hills. 

Once I made it downtown, I wandered through the Seattle Center (you know, the place with the Space Needle). I'd been there before, but still appreciated the strange architecture of the Experience Music Project and the displays outside the Science Fiction Museum (though I was still too cheap to buy tickets for either). From there I walked down to the waterfront to see Olympic Statue Park, which had some interesting pieces and some great views of mountains across the Puget Sound.

I returned to the Seattle Center and viewed the fountain in its center. The events center next to the fountain was hosting a "World Rhythm Festival," which wasn't nearly as cool as the tattoo festival that was there when Stacia and I visited. I spent some time recalling other moments from my previous visit, including seeing fuchsias that matched Stacia's hair, impulse buying cotton candy, and being amazed at how well the fountain's bursts of water were synced with the music on the center's sound system.

After a dinner of Mexican food -- which was fairly good except for the strangely flat and crisp sopapillas -- I  caught a show at the Repertory Theatre. 'An Iliad', which opened with the first line of the Iliad in Greek (quite familiar to me and any other Reedie), was an excellent one man show of a hobo cursed to tell that tale over and over throughout time. It did a fantastic job of connecting the Iliad to our lives now by talking about unending stupid wars, and fleshing out moments from the tale to give their full emotional impact, such as Andromache preparing a bath because she is trying to convince herself that Hector will come back and need it, even though deep down she knows as well as anyone that her husband has no chance against Achilles. 

I started the next day at the Burke Museum, a part of the University campus. There were some good displays on the Fossil Highway, both in terms of fossils collected and a series of paintings depicted the experience of driving around to find them. I was most impressed by the section of the museum detailing how glaciers carved the Puget Sound and how the periodic floods of glacial Lake Missoula carved the Columbia river gorge. The floods occurred when the giant sheets of ice holding the water back would burst, releasing a body of water half the volume of Lake Michigan to the sea, with huge icebergs in it that helped tear the epic gorge out from nearly flat ground. Another section of the museum dealt with Pacific cultures, and even had a display of traditional Korean weddings, which I can assure you were accurate. 

I walked to Green Lake, a pleasant nature area and good sized lake in the neighborhood Northwest of the University. After walking the lake's perimeter and hanging out in the adjoining park, I checked out an impressive historical costume shop, as well as some other entertaining stores in the University District. I then returned to my host's place for a delicious meal. He was president of the University's cuisine club, and it showed. He and his roommates served soup with shrimp, three sauce chicken, green beans, and shrimp with eggs. Over dinner we discussed his Taiwan military service, and his time as an MP guard. While he did homework afterward, I finished blogging about Korea in preparation for my surprise return home.