Visiting Seattle

Back on Dec. 18th I spent only 8 hours in Seattle but it was first time seeing Seattle so I tried to soak up as much as I could.

I was dropped off near the Space Needle.

Instead of going up the needle, I decided to check out the science fiction museum and experience music project.

There was one room with many pieces of science fiction props, a timeline of science fiction and many video clips to watch. R2D2 was in the robots section.

An animatronic Donatello was also behind glass.

They had a fan-made borg costume and also this face piece that Patrick Stewart wore when Picard was transformed into a borg in a Star Trek TNG episode.

They also had the model used as the Death Star in Star Wars. It is about a meter wide and the backside of it is not complete. Instead you can see inside it where they put a light bulb to make light shine out of it.

Upstairs they had a Battlestar Galactica exhibit and since I've never seen a full episode this chart was useful.

They had a couple full size ships from the series along with a model of the galactica main ship. They also had some costumes that characters on the show have worn. What was most entertaining to me was an interactive monitor that presented moral choices that occurred in the show. Then I had to pick an action and it told me what percent of people agreed with me and also a clip of what they actually did on the show.

The experience music project was cool too. They had this big sculpture made of nearly 700 instruments stuck together, 40 of which are self-playing instruments. The big exhibit there was for Jimi Hendrix who I'm not really a fan of but it was still interesting. I went into a theater and watched part of a concert of his where he smashed his guitar, poured gasoline on it and then lit it on fire. At the EMP they also had many booths where you could learn to play an instrument and rooms where you could record yourself. I could have spent most of a day in these two places if I had more time.

Back outside I walked around the building to see its crazy architecture. In the area was a closed down carnival with some little rides. There was also a monorail but I wanted to walk across Seattle.

My next stop was the Hurricane Cafe which some friends recommended to me as a place to really fill up - a typical greasy spoon diner. I had a taco salad there that was really good. Then I walked to downtown Seattle and along the waterfront for a while passed many piers until I reached Pike Place market. It's like Granville Island except inside one giant building in many levels going up a hill. Seattle is much steeper than Vancouver.

I went passed the fish market which didn't look too amazing except that everyone was taking photos of it, so I did too.

Then I visited the library which is shaped really weird with an overhang.

The 4th floor is all red.

The escalators are all very green and the stairs are orange.

I sat on the big open 10th floor for a while and read a book.

The walls were sloped inward on two sides.

They were sloped outward on the other two sides. Later I went online with my laptop on the library's free wifi. I talked to Gordon who told me the library was designed to look like a stack of books. Ah, now it makes more sense.

Outside I went back over near Pike Place to visit the original Starbucks because I had a couple more hours until my bus left.

On the way I passed this very odd building that I wouldn't want to work in.

I went south and located the Amtrak station where my bus wasn't going to leave for an hour so I searched for food in the area. There wasn't much around there but I found a place called Samurai Noodles. Upon entering, I was surprised to find all the employees were caucasian. I'm so used to having any asian restaurant in the lower mainland be actually run by asian people. Anyways, the food was still quite good.

My bus trip back was uneventful as I slept almost the whole way but had to wake up to walk through customs at the border. I got home around 1am and collapsed into bed. I had succeeded in visiting all the places my friends suggested. My brother went to Seattle a couple weeks later and saw a lot more of it than I did because he did not restrict himself to just the downtown area. Next time I'm there I definitely want to check out the chocolate factory/shop he went to.