1. Big cars.
2. Peanut-butter M&Ms.
3. Freedom, and clothes with eagles celebrating freedom.
4. Epic Meal Time videos (and YouTube.com for that matter; where would the world go for videos of animals riding animals?).
5. All-night diners that serve pancakes and milkshakes simultaneously.
6. Baseball hats.
Despite loving a lot of what America provides, I figured I needed to expand my life experiences to become a better person. I worried that I was making a lot of similar mistakes because I had not seen enough of the world to better understand alternative ways to deal with things. Also, I wanted to see other parts of the world and live somewhere entirely outside of my comfort zone. Essentially, I was worried that I had grown as much as I could in Illinois, and it was time for something decidedly not Illinois.
But, with recent trips to San Diego for Comic-Con, and now to Seattle for Lizzie's Induction to America Road Trip, I have found myself enjoying other parts of the country in ways similar to how I enjoy Aberystwyth, and even considering living in these parts of the country. To better help me understand what about these places appeals to me, I have decided to discuss each city here. This will also save me from the incredibly uninteresting posts that detail every little trip I take. Context, my readers, will make things more interesting.
Installment 1: Seattle.
On coming to Seattle, I had considered it to be a Pittsburgh of the Pacific Northwest: a city big enough to have a downtown, but really with little in it to make it more exciting that Chicago. Let's be honest: Chicago is the third largest city in America (which is itself a country full of large cities). What could any city, other than New York and Los Angeles have over it? Especially Seattle.
Here's what I new of Seattle: a lot of good music comes from this part of the country due in no small part to the crazy amounts of rain dumped annually on the city. A lot of bands which were influential to rock and roll today came from Seattle: Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and a host of other grunge rock bands stripped glam-rock of the hair, make-up and general douche-i-ness and gave America angsty, simple songs about anger, disappointment and rain. The music was dark.
Also, a lot of people drank coffee and read used books. Good rainy weather activities.
With this rain, grunge music and an obsession with cheap copies of Tolstoy comes another commonly repeated fact about Seattle: suicides. I have heard it told, and this is totally on hearsay alone, that there are a surprisingly high percentage of suicides in Seattle every year. The teens are dark, confused and embittered which leads them to make horrible mistakes.
So why would anyone want to come here? I like Nirvana as much as the next man raised in the 90s, but it seems like a horrible place to start a vacation (particularly one that would end in sunny California).
Happily, though, my three days in Seattle have proven that I actually don't know anything about this place. For starters, unlike Pittsburgh or Indianapolis (both cities I have visited and been horribly disappointed with), Seattle has a vibrant and functional downtown area. This is in no small part due to Pike St. Market - the worlds oldest, long-running outdoor market. This market provides Seattle residents with a lot of nice perks: cheap fresh cut flowers, fresh fish and other seafood, cheap carry-out foods, and somewhere to just go and watch humanity walk by. This is a famous part of town, known for the stall that tosses fish and for giving birth to Starbucks. Besides providing entertainment for the locals, it also draws a lot of tourists every year. This provides jobs for locals, both in the Market and around it.
Which brings me to my second point: the downtown area is rather well-trafficked, even at night. Go to Pittsburgh (sorry, I really didn't like Pittsburgh) after five PM and the city shuts down. The downtown area is used primarily for business, so once business closes for the day the city shuts down. To a certain extent, this is true for Chicago's loop, too. The difference being that Chicago is a bigger city with more neighborhoods near the Loop, allowing for this shut down of the business district to ghost the entire town. Seattle, though, seems to keep a lot of bars, restaurants and clubs open in and around the Market for some time after the stalls have been cleaned out. Lizzie and I walked the sea-front at about 9:00 pm one night, and there were still plenty of people milling about.
That said, there were at least two distinct neighborhoods outside the central areas (Pike St. and the City Center, featuring the Space Needle) that both had unique vibes, and seemed, from my limited experience, to be interesting places.
First was the University of Washington's campus. As anyone who goes to Yale knows, the area surrounding a campus can be kind of dodgy. This was true of Monmouth (to some extent) and Carbondale (definitely). The influx of students can ruin the neighborhood, trashing the houses and drawing in dive bars, late-night liquor stores and pawn shops. The trifecta of college survival tools. The Ave, as it is known to locals, is not at all like that. Our hotel, The College Inn, is quite literally down across the street from the western entrance to campus. From the looks of the website and the reviews, it looked like a student hostel, and I was worried it would have student hostel-like accommodations: leaky, poorly lit bathrooms with moldy showers and warped linoleum; squeaky, lumpy mattresses with moth-eaten blankets and stained sheets; a piss-poor breakfast of stale bread and warm juice. The College Inn was none of these things. The bathrooms are clean, the beds comfortable (and clean), and the breakfast is quite nice for something included in the price. The building itself is on Seattle's Historic Register, having recently been restored to it's glory days from the early 1920s. All in all, for a cheaper hotel, this was the best you could ask for. Hell, I've slept in more expensive hotels with less fineries than this.
The surrounding neighborhood is an eclectic mix of restaurants and clothing stores. Despite there being a mass of college students, there was not a single McDonalds in the six or so blocks that Lizzie and I walked looking for food. There were hundreds of Asain restaurants, including Thai, Vietnamese, pan-Asian noodles, Chinese, and Himalayan. There were several kabob shops, gyro joints and burger places. There was even one place that featured fish and chips. There wasn't a dive bar or cheap liquor store to be found, and to that end, there was not a lot of publicly drunken teenagers trashing the street. There were cafes to do school work or chill out, bars to have a friendly pint or watch sports, and coffee shops. Always plenty of coffee shops. The constant presence of young people made the place feel more vibrant.
Further down the I-5 Interstate was the trendier, older Capitol Hill. As an example of how trendy this place is, Lizzie and I met Kat (the owner and driver of Barbie's Dream Hearse) out at a late-night cappuccino bar for a board/card game night. There, people raucously played Settlers of Catan, Apples to Apples and other board or card games. There was cake eaten and a lot of coffee or coffee like beverages consumed.
And this was not the only place. Of course, being in Seattle, there were a LOT of trendy coffee places and wine bars. There were a lot of pizza places and other late-night food joints open. But with all of these trendy places comes trendy people. There were more ironic mustaches and cut-off skinny jeans shorts than I cared to count (and really one of each is more than one should have to see). At the game night, there was a general hipster vibe that followed me out the place and around Capitol Hill. It's not that I hate hipsters, I just have a hard time taking anyone who is that constantly ironic very seriously. However, sometimes you have to take the bad with the good. If listening to someone argue that the Beatles only sound good in mono means I get to play Settlers of Catan, then that is one bitter pill I will happily swallow.
Now, if money were no option and I wanted to live in Seattle, I would choose - without a shadow of a doubt - Bainbridge Island. This island, accessible by ferry, was nothing too special in and of itself. It had a downtown that boasted some niceties, but nothing as quaint as Martha's Vineyard or Mackinaw Island. What it did have, though, were houses on the coast facing the Seattle skyline. Sitting across the bay, these houses provided spectacular views of the city. On a clear day like today, Mt. Rainier's constantly snowy slopes loomed large to the South. A half-hour ferry across the bay seems a small price to pay for such inspiring views. The houses, on the other hand, were in reality no small price to pay. A two bedroom, two and a half bathroom house cost upwards of $1,000,000 dollars. With price tags like that, the ferry ride suddenly seemed like a lot to ask of a person.
In short, I liked Seattle. From here, Lizzie and I are going to rent a car and drive to Oceanside, Washington, taking the 101 around Olympic National Park (through, of all places, Forks - the home of fictional vampire and teenage wet dreams Edward Cullen). This will give me a peek at the natural respites that Seattle has to offer, and hopefully will soldify my feeling that Seattle might be a pretty cool place to live.
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