Friday in Seattle

August 30, 2008 8:50:08 AM CDT
Written Saturday morning about sightseeing in Seattle on Friday

My mouth is...let's see, how would the kids put it these days... nuked? We just barely caught the start of the concerts last night, which included the amazing OneUps, the Freezepops and Jonathan Coultan. That's kind of starting at the end though, so I'm gonna back up. (Writer's note: it's going to be a while before I get back to this.)

The whole day was awesome. We woke up early (and by early I mean 7ish local time, which would have already been 9 in Illinois and an incredibly late start for me). Pat was riding into Seattle to spend the day with us doing touristy stuff. We started out by going down to the Farmer's Market, which I can only really describe as a chaotic and haphazard assortment of inside and outside streets, alleys and hallways all lined with tiny little shops offering an incredible variety of goods. We saw the fresh fish counters, where they toss the goods across the room to each other (they didn't toss anything while we were watching though), and a bronze pig that apparently was some kind of historical thing. I don't know. We took a picture.

We spent some time wandering through the passageways getting lost and looking for a shop to sell us something tasty for breakfast. We found a corner bakery that smelled absolutely incredible. A mix of the freshest bread and cinnamon. In fact, the place had "cinnamon" in the name, but I can't remember exactly what it was called. (Edit: Despite the fact that I've attached an image with the exact name. Oi I'm dense sometimes.) I got a HUGE cinnamon pull-apart roll thing and a cup of coffee (NOT starbucks) and Jenn got a muffin of some sort. Pat got a cinnamon roll too and we walked down to a park area overlooking the bay. For some reason it was really windy-- Jenn and I joked we must have brought the "windy city" thing with us from Chicago. I couldn't complain though: bright, sunny, warm but not hot: it was perfect weather other than the wind and I was happy for it.

I want to take a minute here and make sure you understand that I've lived my entire li fe in Illinois; a state that has very little vertical geographic variance. (That's a nerdy way of saying "it's really damn flat".) I've spent my entire life in the suburbs and more or less surrounded on all sides by corn fields. Visiting a place like Seattle is interesting to me if for no other reason than for its actual honest to gods geography. There's real hills, and a bay, and things beyond the bay. It's all very interesting to look at. I was also struck by the idea that at some point in history, people had to build around the land and not just put things wherever the hell they wanted because everything was already completely flat without any water in the way. It really reminded me of SimCity. (Interesting point: when I play SimCity, the first thing I usually blow my entire budget on is terraforming the entire map to a nice flat area with n othing in the way to build around. I'd be the worst urban planner in the world. If I want to get really psychoanalytical, this urge must come from playing too much Populous as a kid.)

After we finished eating, we took all the obligatory photo combinations: Jenn and I, Jenn and Pat, me and Pat, just Pat, just me, just Jenn, some other random couple (they saw us doing our little photo shoot and asked us to take a picture of them), and of course the three of us. From there we walked along the water south past the aquarium and a bunch of seafood places. (Something else we don't have in Illinois: fresh fish.) Eventually we turned back towards the heart of the city and started trudging up some gnarly hills. We made a second city comparison at that point: we wondered if we were now in San Francisco. Some of those hills must have been close to a 40 degree grade, and we took 2 breathers on our way up 9 blocks. Pat showed us the areas where the underground tours run, and we once again took some obligatory tourist photos of the spot marking the historical start of the city (or something-- even Pat wasn't too clear.)

We're really bad tourists.

And Pat is a really bad tour guide.

Having satisfied our need for occasional exposure to the sun, we headed back towards the hotel and changed clothes (too many damn hills!) then headed down to officially start PAX. Jenn and I had planned our itinerary more than a week ago around the events we wanted to watch, the panels we wanted to sit in on, and where Wil Wheaton was going to be, so we had already decided to skip the keynote and its long queue line in favor of being able to catch a couple other things instead. We went to the expo hall while we waited for the first panel.

Editing note: The story stops here, abruptly, again. When one is on an awesome trip like this, finishing your complete story from yesterday isn't as important as going out and experiencing a great story today. The funny thing is, I can't remember everything we did after that but before the next post, which I guess proves my theory that it was a really damn good idea to write it down. Too bad you can't pause time and write for three hours to get everything in while it's still in your pathetic little head.