Day: 3 September 2003

Getting around Seattle is a bit wacky. There are the messed up highways with dead-end exits. Cheaper, reflective road turtles are preferred over streetlamps, so it can be tricky driving at night. Streets can be steep and precarious, with tiny streetsigns completely obscured by trees, and littered with stupid “traffic calming” devices like giant flowerbeds in the middle of intersections.

A lot of people drive towering SUVs, generally with tinted glass. HOV “diamond” lanes that allow cars carrying only two people – and they are still generally fairly empty. Everyone drives a car – just not necessarily together.

My sister currently lives in Bellevue, which is a suburbia east of Seattle proper across Lake Washington. It is quite a sight to take the 520 freeway across the water whenever you enter downtown Seattle.

Right underneath the 520 is a recreational waterway. If you ever want to paddle a canoe underneath a freeway, this is your big chance.

The buses actually have nice comfortable seats. Express buses run along the bridges across Lake Washington regularily. Most of the buses have bike racks so you can stick your bike on.

Express buses entire downtown Seattle underground. Here is the Westlake bus station. Once in Seattle proper, buses shut down there diesel engines and deploy electric guides and operate on electrical dynamos, like streetcars.

Every car owner has to pay a tithe to help support the downtown monorail, even though you still must pay to use it. It only has two stops, Seattle Centre and Westlake Mall, and they are 1.5 miles apart.

I spent the afternoon in downtown Seattle on my own, browsing Westlake Shopping Centre, Pike Place, and the piers along the water. I finally got to see Nordstrom’s, which is essentially the top floor of Sears. Here’s an odd difference between Canadian and American shops: in the US you have your poor man’s department store (Target) and your rich man’s department store (Nordstrom’s), while Canadians mostly lump everything in one store, like Sears or The Bay.

At night, I joined up with Shawn and Shell, and we went to the University of Washington to see a very packed but very entertaining lecture on Mars. The lecture hall put BSB 147 to shame, it probably had a over 500 people in it.

After the lecture, the line up to the telescope was too long, so we went searching for our own little treasures: sculptures in a bohemian part of town called Fremont.

There is the Fremont troll, who dwells underneath the I-99 and can be seen eating a real Volkswagen. There’s a statue of Lenin, apparently rescued from post-USSR Russia, and a model space rocket, made of actual parts from Lockheed Martin.