Seattle is fun, compact, cool, clean, even neat. By New York standards the streets are empty. Seriously there are very few people on the streets. I found that refreshing. The air was refreshing too.
I started my explorations with visit to the Space Needle and the Experience Music Project (EMP) created by Paul Allen. The view from Space Needle looks like this:
After enjoying the view, I did my duties in the gift shop. There I discovered that amazing master of the glass, Dale Chihuly, is from Washington. I bought a desk calendar with his works and learned that there is a gallery with his works on 5th Avenue.
Next stop was EMP live. I knew about this music museum because I used to work for Plumb Design, the company that created the web site and the software for the digital lab. The museum turned out to be cool, but pretty small. Of course the staff members never heard of Plumb Design and had no idea of what Thinkmap (software used for the navigation of the museum artifacts) was. Luckily I found it in the lab; 4 years later it is still awesome.
After that I drove downtown. I parked near the Art Museum and went to the Pike Street public market. The place was really cool. It was a labyrinth of shops, flower stands and food. The thing was that there are a lot of market places, but a few of them are cool. This one was cool, because people sold neat stuff not the crap that they did not need.
Near Pike street market is the first location of Starbucks. I obviously could not miss that. I confirm it does smell old. But the original sign is different! Take a look:
From the market I headed to old downtown via 2nd avenue. That's when I realized that Seattle is pretty small. In about 15 minutes I was in Pioneer Square. On the positive side, I took a lot of pretty pictures while I was walking.
From the Pioneer square I walked to the Elliot bay book store. One the way, I saw a lot of cool arts and crafts shops. (Again not crap, cool). This book store also turned out to be large. I was tired and needed coffee so I bought two books and head out. I found a perfect spot in Occidental square were I relax, had coffee read book by Linus Torvalds and checked out local folk.
My walk back to the car was via 4th and 5th ave. Since there were a lot of really beautiful buildings I could not resist taking pictures. Here is the picture of Seattle public library.
To sum up. Great town. At least great first impression. I think I could live there. Who knows maybe one day I will.
P.S. A worthy place to eat is sea food restaurant called Saltys.
All pictures from this trip...
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