Seattle

Our friends Hannah and Andrew were getting married in Seattle, which gave me a great excuse to go and explore the city. It was my first time there, so we did some touristy things, and we spent a good amount of time hanging out with friends from NU who had also traveled there for the event. I didn’t want to be the weirdo with the camera, so there are no photos of the wedding itself.

We arrived late Thursday, and started out Friday morning walking around. Nikhil joined us, and we had coffee at Milstead, which set a high bar for the trip - it ended up being the best coffee we had that weekend.

We stayed at an Airbnb in Fremont. It was an interesting neighborhood, pretty residential, but also with a bunch of coffee shops and bars.

Beer does matter

Getting a good photo of The Troll is pretty hard, so here’s the street opposite to it.

Continuing with the tourism, we went to Pike Place Market.

Walking around downtown reminded us all about Chicago. These two looked a lot like the corn cobs.

Of course, we went to see the spheres.

We were on the fence about going to the Space Needle, but it was fun. It’s retrofuturism gave us a sense of what people in the 60s thought the future would be like.

It’s odd to see a Lenin statue in the US.

Unexpectedly, I found Evanston.

I didn’t really know that Seattle had actual fall.

One of my favorite shots of the trip.

The things you find on the street.

The Museum of Pop Culture was super cool, but it felt like a hodge podge. By far, the part I enjoyed the most was the Nirvana room, where they mapped out the history of the band and the rise of grunge as a genre in the early 90s. I kept thinking of my brothers and their music taste as I walked around the exhibits. The Hendrix room had the same “Seattle connection” value to it, and the “famous guitars” room was fun to walk around, but the rest of the museum just didn’t feel cohesive.

Gotta love Erpat

Dark bars make for bad and noisy photos, no matter how far you bump the ISO. Here’s the only one I got to salvage.

Getting out of this car was a whole production.

Starbucks Reserve is an exercise in marketing more than anything else, but we had to go check it out. The steampunk vibe is real.

On our last day there, we went to the Museum of History and Industry. Here’s Megan looking through a periscope there. I would totally have overlooked this museum if my friend Kate hadn’t pointed it out. It provides a deep dive of Seattle history, from it’s first settlers to it’s twentieth century industrialization. Then, it takes a hard turn to the more recent tech boom, with a lot of praise for Microsoft and Amazon (perhaps too much).

And that was Seattle.

Ah, and I didn’t manage to take a photo of these two happy people while I was there, so here’s one I took this weekend, when they came to visit us in SF. Congrats, you two!

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