Trip to Vancouver & Seattle - Day 7

Although our Seattle hotel was pretty lame, the breakfast was actually pretty good!! I had agreed to take Aisling to some local thrift stores recommended to us by Lucia, so right after breakfast we headed off to one near our hotel, where she could enjoy second-hand Seattle clothes!! We then headed into Seattle to Pike's Place market, which is fun, if a little touristy. Gordon and Aisling explored the market while I headed over to the University of Washington to have lunch with my friend Sara. We did a very short tour of the local campus area. We visited a new office building, recently acquired by the university from Safeco, after Safeco consolidated it's staff in it's newer downtown Seattle building. It's a very nice building and it's being utilized mostly for administrative folks, so I visited Sara's office plus the office of my former colleague from Berkeley who is now the budget person at UW. What a fabulous view, downtown Seattle and Rainier, still visible in the slight smog. After lunch I met up with Gordon and Aisling again. We dropped Gordon at the Experience Music Project near the Space Needle, and then I took Aisling to the thrift store mecca - the Goodwill Outlet store, which sells old stuff by the pound!! We went to the wrong store first - a regular Goodwill retail store, but probably the largest Goodwill in North America! It was huge! But Aisling held her shopping for the Outlet store, where she bought 15 lbs of clothes and I bought an extra suitcase just to get home! The Goodwill by the pound is not my thing, but she had a blast.

We headed back over to the Seattle Center and picked up Gordon. He loved the Experience Music Project, probably could have spent two days there! But we moved on to the Space Needle. Since I've done it before, I stayed on the ground while Gordon and Aisling went up and enjoyed the views. We then did a few of the rides at the Seattle Center, including the roller coaster and log flume (since it was the hottest day of the year in Seattle) before heading over to Pioneer Square for the underground tour.

We really enjoyed the underground tour. It started with a discussion of the history of Seattle, how it was founded etc. I won't give all the details, apparently one should read a book by the tour founder, Bill Speidel, who died in 1988. The guide was informative and amusing. They seem to enjoy making fun of Tacoma. The history is that when Seattle was built first, in the second half of the 19th century, it was made of wooden building, and it was also built at a pretty low level, which made it subject to mud and flooding. There was also much discussion of sewage and the early "crappers" which I won't go into here. Anyhow, after a fire destroyed pretty much all Seattle in 1889, the merchants rebuilt in stone, but declined the city's request to wait several years while the city was regraded and sidewalks were more or less raised. After the building were back up, the city came in and raised the streets by anywhere from 10 to 35 feet, meaning that large portions of the building were underground. The sidewalks had ladders at each end, and people would climb up and down to get around. ultimately, the merchants built the sidewalks at street level and mostly filled in the lower floors of their buildings although a couple remain as basement, including in the Pioneer building. Years later, they excavated some of the filler out of the buildings and now they have the underground tour. It's a great tour, although we did see a rat while we were down there. It ends in a nice little museum, although Aisling didn't have a lot of patience for that after 90 minutes wandering around the underground!

We had dinner at a Chinese restaurant in Chinatown. All in all, I prefer Vancouver's Chinatown to Seattle's. In fact, I think it's my favorite Chinatown and I've even been in China! We headed home to the difficult task of packing Aisling's purchases!

Pictures are on Flickr.