Plenty of Sleep in Seattle

Or perhaps I should title it "Sleepless on the way to Seattle." See, on Thursday of last week, we had an intern picnic after work with the best tacos I've ever eaten in my life. Really. Served by real mexican people too, of course. Then I got 10 minutes to breathe before we went over to a friend's house and watched Batman Begins. See, someone hadn't seen it yet and needed to see it before we went to see The Dark Knight that night at midnight. Which we did after that movie. We went and sat in the theater for two hours and played cards or read various books (I went with Harry Potter) while we waited for the movie. Totally worth the wait and the sleepless night. A-mazing. Went to bed at around 3:15 and got up at 7-ish for work. We worked until 2, then Bem, Sara and I headed out for Seattle by 3-ish.

When we got to town, the traffic was bad, but the weather was beautiful. Not to hot, not too cold. We were attempting to go to the baseball game, but we got there 10 minutes before it started and the cheapest tickets were $30 for the upper deck with an obstructed view. So I met up with Josh, the friend from Clemson who now lives in Seattle, and we all got back in the car and headed to Fremont, where Josh lives. He was kind enough to let us stay in his living room for the weekend, so he gets mad props for that and a blog shout-out. Anyway, for those who know anything about Seattle, he lives litterally around the corner from the Fremont Troll. You'll see the cool troll dude in the pictures. That night, we went to dinner at a greek place within walking distance and wandered around Fremont for a bit, seeing all the strange things there are to see there.

Saturday started bright and early with the waffles that Josh promised a large crowd of people back around New Years. They were delicious. We hopped on a bus and headed into downtown Seattle. First stop of the morning was the City Center. The area around the Space Needle. Allow me to stop and comment on the use of the word "space." If you were to add "space" to the front of a lot of words, it would make it so much cooler. I mean, think about it: needle? no, that's lame. space needle? woah! how cool! I want to see that!

Okay, I'm back on track now. So yeah. It costs $14 to go up the space needle. Obviously, we didn't submit to this extortion. Instead, we took cool shots of the skyline from all over town. It's always cooler to have the space needle in your photo, if you ask me. We took pictures of all sorts of stuff and goofed around until we decided to wander over to Pike's Place Market. The market is down in the pier area, of course. Somehow, we missed the original Starbucks on the walk down there and didn't make it back up to see it. Oh well. If I can go to Starbucks in Nebraska, it's no longer cool. The market, on the other hand, was cool. I'm afraid I did not catch a fish flying through the air in my pictures, as everyone there didn't actually want to buy a fish. Although their smoked salmon samples were absolutely delicious. Made me want fish. So, after wandering through all the little junk shops in the market and looking at the beautiful flowers and produce (I really wish I could have shipped some of this food home, but it wouldn't be fresh. Might as well buy it a BiLo at that point), we walked a few more piers down and went to Ivar's, this seafood place that serves fish and chips. It was quite delicious despite the wait (it's rather famous and popular) and the seagulls trying to get your food if you eat outside.

After a very fresh seafood lunch, it was on to the public library and a nice loop around town. The library was so stinking cool. And a little bit strange. The level that was entirely red was creepy. The highlighter yellow escalators were very cool though. We got lost once. We were trying to find out how to get to this level we could see from the ground floor, but we missed it by accident. After playing in the library and wandering around town a bit, we went to the ferry pier and caught a boat over to Bainbridge Island. This is where all the rich people live around Seattle, or so it seems. We went there for their ice cream. Mora has the most amazing combinations of flavors ever. I had an absolutely delicious green tea ice cream. We wandered the little town, then went to catch the ferry back. The ride wasn't bad, by the way. I actually think Amy could handle it. We stopped into Nordstorm Rack (obviously the girls' choice), then headed over to Capitol Hill to have dinner with some other guys from the lab. We ate at a place called the Garage that had bowling, pool, and delicious french fries and burgers.

Sunday, we took our time getting up before heading to the Gas Works Park for a while. The park is located on Lake Union and has a fantastic view of the downtown area. They have a sundial that you stand on to get the time. It had directions. I think it was wrong. By an hour. But it was still very cool. The park used to be a coal gassification facility that manufactured oil for heating and lighting use in the area. They buldozed most of the buildings and piled them up before covering them with earth to make the hill where the sundial is. The old equipment is still there. Big rusty tanks and stuff, some concrete arches that used to hold pipes, and this barn full of equipment that they painted to make it kid friendly. I think it's a death trap, but that's Butch Burka coming out there. We walked back into Fremont and visited the Lenin statue. Apparently some dude mortgaged his house and went to slovakia to get it. Now it has no home and is currently for sale to anyone who wants to diplay it in the way the dude wanted. It's quite cool and I think Fremont needs to keep it. It's is also supposed to be the only known statue in which Lenin is neither reading a book or waving his hat. In this one, he's walking, with waving objects behind him that are supposed to symbolize guns and fire. Very cool. We ate lunch next to Lenin, then walked for a bit more and took a picture of the "Center of the Universe" sign, not to be confused with the sign I saw in Portland. Fremont is the official center of the universe. Bet you didn't know that.

Last night, we went on a sunset hike that I got some pictures of. Expect to see some of those in next week's blog.

Last but not least. There are 182 awesome pictures in today's post. They all have captions and I didn't want you to miss any, so I did not set the slide show to start automatically. You'll have to actually press play. Enjoy!