Seattle

Note: I'm in Houston at present, and I'll be back in Flower Mound tomorrow, but stay tuned! I'll be updating pretty frequently to get posts up about each of my stops as well as some overall reflections about my experience.

I've been to Seattle a couple of times before, but always in the context of family vacations in the surrounding area - Olympic National Park, an Alaskan Cruise - so I was eager to visit it on my own and see it anew.

The new stuff began hours before reaching the city because of my different method of approach, as we crossed through the Cascades in Oregon and Washington. The views were enchanting, and I recommend taking the train up the West coast, the Coast Starlight, to see them for yourself.


I didn't go up in the Space Needle, but I did stitch together some images of it after walking past it to go to lunch. There was more to the panorama, but I learned an important lesson: never take panoramas of scenes with moving traffic unless you are really, really good at it (which I am not).


Perhaps the most unusual thing that I saw in Seattle was something in Pioneer Square that defies easy description: guerrilla knitting installation art, perhaps? There was a woman in the square actively attaching these knitted sleeves to light posts, trees, and street lamps, adding bright splashes of color to the peaceful, muted square.


In addition to Seattle proper, I spent one day on Vashon Island with John Rosenwinkel (Olin '11.5). To get there, I took a ferry from downtown and then hopped a bus on the island to Burton, where John is living. After John and I had been walking a bit along the road toward his house, I noticed a profound difference between Vashon and Seattle - really between any isolated area and the nearest major city - it was quiet, blessedly quiet. With Vashon the difference is magnified by the closeness of downtown Seattle and Tacoma, but because that distance is over water, the island is like a different world.

On Vashon we ate wild fennel from the side of the road. We went kayaking to an uninhabited beach on the island, where there were innumerable sand dollars. Kayaking gave my arms a workout they had been missing for a few months. Having broken my left wrist in February, I was very pleased to be able to do this.

My final night in Seattle was spent having Indian food with a whole mess of Oliners working for Microsoft as interns and full-timers. It was good to see them all.