Smells Like Teen Spirit ... No That's the Westin

For Seattle, part 2, I was staying at the Westin hotel downtown with a group of friends who had driven up from San Francisco. According to my friend, who has stayed at Westin hotels a lot on business, each of their hotels has the trademarked "Westin smell," something between lavender and industrial strength floor shampoo.



Since our room was on the 44th floor, we had some nice views, although we weren't facing much except for Lake Union.



Westin hotels also have adopted these double-headed showers, which to me seemed rather useless except as a way to waste more water than usual. Maybe you need to be a more frequent guest to understand how to use them to their full potential.



Seattle is known for being a pretty innovative town, not just when it comes to music and computers, but with meals as well.



People who work downtown are pretty fun-loving (happy hours are ubiquitous, and typically last for two hours) but they also take some things seriously.



We stopped at a bagel place for breakfast and to see another example of Seattleites' fondness for spelling out a word using the object that word describes.



Seattle, like many cities, likes to use decorative brick pavers on some of its streets, particularly in historical or otherwise tourist-populated areas. With all the rain in the city, this can often prove hazardous.



I visited Pike Place Market for a third and final time. I was starting to feel like a regular.



Aside from all the food and things, the market sells a lot of toys and collectibles.



Across the street from the market is the original Starbucks Coffee location. We kept our distance.



In Seattle, driving a Prius with an Obama sticker on it means that your parking job can be as bad as you want it to be.



Once again we paid a visit to Seattle Center. On this particular day (a Friday) there was a lot of activity going on.



First there was the Women in Trades fair, which meant a lot of woodworking and metalworking and a lot of high schoolers milling around (so to speak).







Also, at the nearby Key Arena, they were holding the regional FIRST robotics competition. We got to watch some of the competition and even snuck backstage to get a look at the competitors.





Heading towards the waterfront from there we were saddened to arrive at the headquarters of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, with its rotating globe that reads "It's in the P-I." As just last week the P-I became the first big city newspaper to cancel its print edition, that's now a more difficult claim to make.



Nearby we found Skillet, a kitchen trailer serving "urban street food" that is highly rated. I wish I could give it a review. Unfortunately, all I can say is that they close promptly at 2pm, so if you arrive at 2:03 don't expect to be fed.



On this particular day the wagon was parked outside Classmates.com, so now I know where all those pop-up ads are coming from.



From there it was back to Seattle Center.



And this time we actually went into the EMP (the building situated just behind the log flume). It's a nice museum and again one that doesn't allow photography. I didn't know until we went in that it's actually two museums, and includes the Museum of Science Fiction. If you've ever been dying to see a four-foot diameter model of the Death Star that lights up and plays music, this is the place for you.



After that it was a trip on the monorail back into downtown. The monorail was actually a lot faster than I expected it to be. Too bad it only goes a few blocks.



And of course, the other end of the monorail dumps you in a mall.



In the evening we took a trip back up to the Capitol Hill neighborhod, this time on the more urban, slightly less upscale side of the hill.



We went to a very quiet, very dimly-lit establishment called the Stumbling Monk that carries a great selection of local and Belgian brews, as well as board games for passing the time.





That evening we had dinner at a fancy restaurant downtown called Lola. The meal was fine if you discount the fact that we were charged $3.50 for a small bowl of pita wedges, and that one of our group got horribly ill after eating the seafood tagine.



The next morning we made a visit to the Fremont neighborhood.



Fremont is another arts-oriented neighborhood, but one that has been established for long enough that gentrification has almost fully taken hold. Even newer development retains an artsy character.



Oh, and the weather, once again, was cold and damp.



We had a great brunch at a little French bistro and then toured around the must-see sites of Fremont, which include the rocket ship ...



The Center of the Universe ...



The Funhole ...



The requisite pretentious furniture advertisement that I can only hope was meant to be ironic ...



The statue of Lenin, which has an interesting story of how it got there, and now seems to be employed as a vehicle for advertising ...





And of course the Fremont Troll.



The troll lives under the Aurora Bridge, and was created and continues to be maintained by the neighborhood's artist community.



Sadly, the troll seemed to have suffered from a recent bout of graffiti, and so the locals had mobilized to clean him up.



Our last stop was Gas Works Park, so named because there is actually an old, defunct gas plant still sitting right in the middle of the park.



It was rather nice and serene despite (perhaps because of?) the giant storage tanks and machinery, but the real attraction is that it is situated on a hill along Lake Union, and provides the perfect spot from which to wave goodbye to Seattle.



Does this view look familiar? You may remember seeing it before, just in the opposite direction.

I enjoyed Seattle quite a bit, it seemed to be the kind of place you can get comfortable with pretty quickly. But America beckons, so it's time to be on my way again.