Seattle

When I was little and we lived in Alaska, all of our mail went through Seattle before it came to us. It was even in our address: APO Seattle Washington, 98733. (APO stands for Army Post Office. Since Alaska is part of the United States but also sort of overseas, all of our mail had to be addressed that way.) As of last week, I have now also been to Seattle, because I went to a conference there.

I arrived a day early, landing on Friday, which gave me most of Saturday to explore before the opening session on Saturday night. Before I could do any exploring, though, I had to make a purchase:



I realized after I got there that I forgot to pack a hat. As a bald person (a person who has baldness?) I can't walk around without a hat unless I want a sunburned scalp, so I selected the least offensive reasonably priced hat at the drugstore by the hotel.

Apparently, I selected poorly.

Look, I don't know a lot about the Seahawks. I know that they are a football team, that they play in Seattle, and that when we lived in Alaska and all of our mail went to Seattle there was a player on the team named Brian Bosworth, who later starred in a terrible movie where he had a mullet and rode a motorcycle, and who dated the blonde lady who played Dolph Lundgren's wife in the "Rocky" movie where they went to Russia, and that's all I know about the Seahawks. Several of my friends, though, have greeted that hat with outrage, horror, and repeated suggestions that I both burn it and that I use it as toilet paper. Whoever the Seahawks are, they are apparently terrible.

They did a bang up job of covering my head, though.

I realize I only saw a few blocks of Seattle, but my overall impressions were that it was very clean, very walkable, and full of trees. So many trees, in the middle of downtown even!











There was also a lot of art, much of which I was directed toward by PokemonGO, which had many of the locations labeled as Pokestops.

















I went to a couple of standard tourist places, like the Space Needle:



which I went to but did not go up, because I got there at 1 PM and the next available ticket was for 4 PM. I also accidentally called it the CN Tower when I was asking how to walk to it at the hotel desk, and no one corrected me.

I also went to the Pike Place Market:



down by the water:



and I stayed there for hours! I looked at art:





and had some mac and cheese from Beecher's:



but mostly I just went into stores and looked at things and stared at people:



















I also took myself out one night for an entertaining dinner:





and on the last morning of the conference a delicious hot chocolate and donut breakfast:









Best of all, I got to see a lot of old friends and former coworkers that I hadn't seen in years, including my former RA, Erika:



who not only took me out to a delicious Indian dinner:



but also referred to me as her favorite former supervisor, without prompting or bribing!

I also went to a lot of conference sessions and took a lot of notes, which was the point of my department sending me.

All of the sightseeing was just a bonus on top of that.