Sleepless in Seattle

Now we reckon the reason why they say 'sleepless in Seattle' is because everyone, and we mean everyone, has a cup of coffee in their hand at all times. Walking down the street, queueing for a bus, shopping, and of course while sitting in a Coffee shop... of which there are numerous. So not to be left out we joined in the crowds and had a lotta coffee, well it'd be rude not to eh? (Careful with the language Jen, we're not in Canada yet eh?)

Despite the fact that everyone is wired on caffeine, everyone is a whole lot friendlier than in New York, the streets are all lit up 'Holiday Style' and look very pretty. But wait, did i say Holiday and not Christmas? Well yes folks, it seems that in an effort not to upset anyone, they have replaced the word Christmas with Holiday. Hmmn, I don't know about you but Holiday Tree conjurs up ideas of a Palm tree gently swaying in a warm summer breeze, not a brightly lit Fir with pressies underneath.

Thanks Jen. Now, first things first. Seattle, home to coffee shops and of course Jimi Hendrix - a quick tribute and a new sticker for the Uke...

Due to free booze and free internet in the executive lounge at JFK we only just made it to Seattle - seems they don't announce flights or let you know they're boarding (that you can hear anyway), but we managed to get another flight out via Dallas and made it to Seattle in the early hours. Not too bad for our first travelling cock-up. Our second wasn't far away as we stepped on the free bus heading a few blocks downtown and got off half an hour later after an unexpected trip down the freeway to who know's where. Still, we got to see a whole lot more of the Seattle area than we'd planned.

At least we didn't take the Monorail...

Eagle-eyed viewers may notice a somewhat wayward door on the other side of the train. Yes, they managed to break the monorail. It seems that if trains try to pass at this spot they can't, and they crash, and there's lots of shouting and panicking and the fire department gets called. Quite fun if you're not involved (don't worry, nobody was hurt, much). So no monorail ride for us.

But who needs the monorail when you've got the underground! No, not that type of underground, the Seattle underground. OK, here's a (very) quick explanation... The city got burnt down in the 1880's (probably) and the store owners wanted to build everything again really quickly, while the town planners wanted to flood the whole area with a nearby hill, thus solving the problems with drainage, but it would take a long time. So they did both. They built the new buildings, then they built walls around all the roads and flooded the roads with a big mudslide so that the roads were up to 30 feet higher than the pavements. Clever. However, climbing ladders to get to street level turned out to be a bit of a problem because people kept falling from the roads and things kept falling from the roads onto people on the pavements. So they built a new sidewalk at road-level and left the old sidewalk underneath - hence the Seattle underground was formed and it looks kinda like this...

There's a few blocks of old unused storefronts and stuff under the current street level - if you shout really loud you can scare the people walking above :-)

As you can see we didn't really get up to much in Seattle, there's a big pointy Space Needle thing that you can see from town and the views are quite nice over Puget Sound. The Chinese food is rather palatable as well, and I'm told, by Jen, that the Chinese Supermarket was particularly fine.

However, we were lucky enough to catch the first night of Dave Gorman's Googlewhack Adventure which was opening just up the street from the hostel (the Green Tortoise, highly recommended with free breakfast, free internet and free meals 3 times a week) - very funny it was too, and we got to meet the great man.

And if you don't believe us, here's the photo...

That's all from the states for now, see you in Canada.

Jen and Col.