Seattle

We flew into Seattle on Thursday evening, mainly because it was considerably cheaper to fly into Seattle than it was Vancouver, although given the palaver over security, we will not be doing that again in a hurry. I’d rather pay the extra fifteen hundred quid and not be jumped through so many hoops next time.

We’ve never been to Seattle before, and I have to say that first impressions were not fantastic.  It was bucketing it down with rain when we drove out of the airport, so hard in fact, that the water was bouncing off the roads and you could hardly see anything.  The road systems are chaos and the traffic is really, really heavy.  It didn’t help that the sat nav kept cutting out every time we went under a bridge or there was a particularly fierce rain drop.

Mostly things looked grey. Grey and industrial.  Our hotel, a bog standard, beige block by the side of a busy road and opposite a working boat yard, with the freeway running at the back, did little to cheer us.  Particularly as they had not made up the kids’ bed, supplied extra bedding of any kind, nor extra towels.  Even when we asked for bedding so we could make the kids’ bed ourselves, it still took them twenty minutes to bring any.  Any consisted of one pillow and two cotton sheets between three children.  Jason went down to get some in the end.  It was quicker.

There was no restaurant and no room service either, which meant that once the kids were asleep we were left with a bunch of take out menus to supply our needs.  By this time I was ready to cry.

Luckily the menu we plumped for served delicious food, albeit after a long wait and two phone calls over the money because we only had hundred dollar bills and they were suspicious.

The food was the only good thing about the entire night.  Oscar rolled under the bed in the night and woke screaming at three, totally disoriented.  That also set Tallulah off.  By the time we calmed them down we were both wide awake.  Then everyone woke up for good at half past five.

Jason, who is either a saint or demented, took the children to the hotel pool at quarter to six.  By quarter to seven we were having breakfast.  The hotel did actually serve breakfast, and it wasn’t too bad at all, contrary to what we had been led to believe from the woeful service of the night before.  The children were incredibly impressed because they had waffle irons so you could make your own waffles.  So, jetlagged to the nines and scratchy eyed I learned to make waffles in the dull, Seattle dawn.  It’s a skill.

We set off, fortified with waffles, to explore Seattle.  I was not hopeful, but throughout the day I was won over, moment by moment, until I was charmed.

First up was the market at Pike Place.  I thoroughly recommend it.  It’s a lovely, Victorian covered market selling everything from fruit and vegetables to antiques.  Each stall is owned and run by family businesses, and no corporate business can operate from there.  The architecture is wonderful, the stall holders are all delightfully friendly, and happy for you to try their wares and there is something for everyone.  Plus they have a giant shoe museum.  It was closed while we were there, but they claim to have a shoe from the tallest man in the world, and an impressive collection of clown shoes.  And I don’t doubt it for an instant.  There is also a fabulous bookstore on the bottom level of the market, run by a really friendly guy who knows his customers inside out. He tried to sell Oscar a copy of a book called ‘Everybody Farts’. Smart guy.

All the streets around the market are full of quirky little shops of all descriptions.  There is a cheesemakers, where you can actually go in and watch them making the cheese before you buy, cheek by jowl with toy stores and vintage clothes shops, and all the sort of places I love, and that you don’t usually find in large, American cities.  We had a fantastic morning pottering about, buying fruit and sampling home made jams and chutneys.  There is a huge tulip festival taking place in Washington State at the moment and the flower stalls were a riot of colour.  I love tulips and the temptation to buy a few hundred blooms was quite overwhelming.

At lunch time we headed to the  famously designed Music and Sci Fi museum by the architect Frank Gehry, which stands next to the Space Needle, a classic Seattle landmark.  We didn’t go up the Space Needle because I hate heights and Jason hates paying over inflated prices for tourist attractions, but we did go to the museum.  I have to be honest and say that it wasn’t my cup of tea.  I love the outside of the building, but the exhibits were fairly blah, and it was really expensive to get in.  In the music side there were lots of hands on exhibits, which could have been fun if most of them hadn’t been broken and the rest hadn’t had large queues outside of them.  The Sci Fi side was mainly traditional in that it was just wandering around a great many glass cases looking at things.  There was the odd interactive exhibit, but I was surprised at how few there were given the fact that it was about Science Fiction and the future.

The best part of the day was when we decided to go on a Duck tour.  Ducks are armoured vehicles which are a car and a boat, and were used in WWII.  They do Duck tours in London too, so if you fancy one you won’t have to hop on a plane to Seattle.  But if you happen to be here you really should go on one.  Your driver takes you around for ninety minutes, about an hour on land and the last half hour on the water, and you visit Seattle’s landmarks while they do the usual history type speeches.  But then it’s all livened up by the fact that you have to sing, and dance and have quizzes and all kinds of fun stuff.  The kids, and us, absolutely loved it.  Our driver was called Captain Johnny Throttle, and had the largest collection of novelty hats I have ever seen.  It was huge fun.

Saturday we headed to the oldest part of the city, Pioneer Square.  Someone had recommended that we do the tour of Underground Seattle which kicks off from there every half hour.  It was fantastic, and I highly recommend it.  Basically Seattle, when it was first settled was built on a plain which got flooded by the sea, and all the sewage that the first settlers poured into the sea, twice a day. This made it quite an unsavoury and rather squishy place to live.  Then in the late 1800′s the whole of Seattle burned to the ground after an unfortunate incident with a vat of hot glue and a spark.  This gave the founding fathers a chance to rebuild the city at a higher level.  The plan was to blast all the earth from the surrounding hills, and then build on that.  The building was going to take ten years, and the business owners who already lost their businesses in the fire, refused to wait ten years to re-open them, on the grounds that they would starve to death in the mean time.  So they built their businesses, and the city fathers built the streets around them.  This of course led to some difficulties. Like the fact that the ground floor of the buildings were between 8 and 33 feet lower than the street level.  People kept falling down holes and killing themselves a lot, which wasn’t great for business either.  Eventually they filled in all the holes and evened out the levels, but this meant that there was a whole chunk of the city which was underground.  And it’s still there.  And in the nineteen sixties, a newspaper man and keen historian, Bill Speidel, started tours round these underground areas, which you can still go on today.

There was a bit of the tour where the guide was telling us about how they had a terrible rat problem, when people started dropping all their waste into these underground areas and it became a breeding ground for the rats.  Apparently the city hall put a bounty on rat’s tails and for every rat’s tail you produced you got ten cents.  It all went horribly wrong when unscrupulous people started breeding rats and cutting their tails off for extra funds.  Then they noticed that the rat’s tails grew back so they could use one rat for many bounties.  A chap who was on the tour with us got terribly confused and thought she had said that if you cut a rat’s head off it would grow back and insisted on asking her lots of questions about it.  Jason and I had to back track into another area of the tunnels while this was going on, because we were crying with laughter.  I thought I might actually pee my pants at one point, or at the very least be sick.

In the afternoon we went out of town, about half an hour down the highway to an outlet mall which some friends had recommended.  We like to shop, and we love a bargain, so all went well, and Jason bought me a very nice Marc Jacob’s watch for a ludicrously small sum of money.

By our last night we were quite sad to leave.  There were lots of bits of Seattle still left to explore and we had almost trained the hotel staff.  Plus we had had excellent food while we were there and there was no shortage of coffee. I do love a city where every third business tries to sell you caffeine.

So, overall impressions, much better than we first thought.  Atypical of American cities, quirky, fun, subversive and excellent coffee.

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