Seattle Experience
We're on the last leg of our Northwest tour, in Portland. Since it was a travel day, we didn't really do a whole lot, in the sense of going out and seeing things. The drive from Seattle to Portland—
I'm going to interrupt myself here to announce that Barbara just checked the bed for bedbugs. I hadn't even thought about that before now, and now I don't think I'm going to be able to stop thinking about it.
Where was I? Oh, right—the drive from Seattle to Portland was exciting. It rained the whole way, and the spray from other traffic often reduce visibility to 100 yards, maybe less. That's not very far at 70 mph. I need to talk about the place we're staying, the Bluebird Guesthouse, and the fantastic meal we had at the Farm Cafe, but I'll save that for another entry. What I really want to talk about are impressions and experiences in Seattle that I haven't mentioned yet.
We had heard that public transportation in Seattle was not as good as it is in Portland. If that's the case, then the buses in Portland must fly, and pick you up outside your window. Basically, we only touched the car to drive to Kirkland to have lunch with the Tyburski family on Saturday. Otherwise, it just sat, parked outside the B&B, while we rode #10 bus downtown. Further, the buses, some of them anyway, are electric, riding along overhead cables streetcars without the rails. It made me think it would be cool to have cars that could extend similar booms and plug in to the transportation power grid. Also interesting are the bus routes that run through dedicated tunnels under the city. They're like an underground, but quieter. I was impressed by the cleanliness and the convenience of the system, as well as the politeness of the users.
For vegetarians, pizza is often a pretty good choice for a meal.
Pizzerias are common, and one has nearly complete control over the
toppings. We've had three pizzas since starting our tour, two on the Oregon
coast, and one in Seattle. None have been fantastic. The one we had at
the Lumberyard in Cannon Beach gets one star out of five. It was a soggy
bog of cheese with a dull crust. At the Main St. Pizza Co. in
Tillamook we got a pie that was okay, but much too expensive for what it
was: so, two stars. At Toscana
Pizzeria we got the best of the bunch, noted on the menu as the
Di Capra
. It had no sauce as such, but was topped with olive oil,
goat cheese, spinach, roasted red pepper, and kalamata olives. The
toppings were excellent, and well proportioned. I like a stone-baked
crust, though, so even this tops out at 3.5 stars.
When in Seattle, don't try to describe the location of a thing by saying, it's next to Starbuck's. That just doesn't work.
I think a saw Jason Truesdell
in the Pike Place Market sunday evening. I should have said, Hi, are
you Jason? I like your blog,
but as an introvert, all I could
manage was an inward, Oh, I think that's a blogger I like...
For New Year's, I should resolve to be more outgoing. Like Barbara. She's good at that sort of thing.
Also Sunday, we were able to see the exhibition Japan Envisions the West, which had just reopened at the Seattle Art Museum. It was a completely different take on Japanese visual arts from any I've seen before. It demonstrated the effect of European and, later, American influence on Japanese art, as well as how the Japanese aesthetic reverberated through the culture of the west as well. While there, we were able to observe a tea ceremony presented by Urasenke Seattle in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the sister cities relationship between Seattle and Kobe, Japan. Unfortunately, difficult seating arrangments made it had to see as well as we would have liked. Still, live shakuhachi and koto performance and getting to see how many scoops of macha to use in a bowl made it time well spent.
I talked about In The Bowl previously, but it's worth noting that we went there three times during our stay, and mentioned it to everyone we talked to. To give you an idea of the atmosphere, on the walls there was Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, and Native American iconography. Sunday night, people were hanging out the door; we got a great table by the window, and enjoyed a meal of appetizers. To top off a meal, diners are brought a serving of black sticky rice pudding. Recommended.
Finally:
Dear Seattle,
We had a wonderful time visiting you, but if you'd clean the fallen leaves out of your gutters, your streets wouldn't look like rivers with tiny strips of pavement running down the middle of them.
Signed, me
We were bummed to discover Cake were playing Portland tonight; it would have been a good show to catch. On the other hand, we saved about a hundred bucks by missing it. Tomorrow, which it is already and I'm still up because we're doing laundry, we're visiting the Torii Mor Winery.
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