Sleepless in Seattle

Monorail outside hotel
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Sleepless in Seattle:

Well! The trip on the cat was a breeze. I took my pills but the water was the flattest I have been over. No wind, no wake from a passing freighter, no swell and we made it ahead of schedule.

Sleepless in Seattle

First impression: A city of lights, noisy roads, busy streets and very friendly people.

Chillis at the market
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We arrived right next door to the centre of the city with the equal of Hobart access. Our hotel was not far away so it was easy to decide to explore the areas around us. That’s where the nice, comfortable feeling ended. Outside the hotel is the monorail. It provides a 90 second ride for $2 from one side of the city to the other. It connects the Seattle Centre with the Downtown shops. It has no other route and is 20 metres above the ground on concrete pylons. It causes noise, shadow and a cold feeling for pedestrians below. We walked away but soon came close to the noise of 8 lane highways. This was not my favourite way to be introduced to the city. But the food was good. We ate Thai and had smaller portions and more variety. Yay!! I had avoided Thai food for years because of an unfortunate experience with a Thai sauce that I thought was like tomato. So I made sure that I chose dishes that I could handle and I quizzed the waiter and had great service.

Sci-Fi exhibition at Seattle Centre
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Talking of service. If you have a group, you are likely to be affected by the small print on many menus. “A gratuity of 18% will be added to the 1 bill for groups of 5 or more.” We used to avoid this by insisting on separate bills therefore we are separate customers who choose to sit together. We then tipped according to our own desires.

Another service trivia piece. “Waiter” and “waitress” has been replaced with “server”. This is not gender specific and is likely to spread.

Going down
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We really only had 1 day in Seattle as we are going to leave in the morning of Monday 5^th. So it was an expensive breakfast of cereal and toast and walking shoes on.

Ahead of us was the shopping area of “Downtown” and past that, the markets along the wharf. Since it was Sunday the traffic was manageable and the noise reasonable. Well, the latter was true until we reached the market. Right behind it is the Alaska Way viaduct of 3 or 4 lanes each way on 2 levels. Traffic roaring past and horrible low-frequency vibrations. That I really did not like.

underground bathroom
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Salamanca really stacks up against any market we have seen in all our travels. It will be interesting to compare with San Fran in the next couple of days.

The market was lively, noisy and full of colour. I really liked it.

Our walk led us down to the wharf area. Seattle is really quite hilly and the height change from the market to the wharf (divided by roads) was about 30 – 40 metres.

We ended up at the Underground Tour where people get to go under the roads and footpaths and learn some of the interesting history of the town’s growth and development over the last 100 years or so. It has a very interesting history of competing development needs and timetables to the extent that, after a fire destroyed the town, the merchants re-built their buildings and footpaths. But the town council wanted to bring in a long-term plan for development which raised the base levels of infrastructure (roads etc) so that floods and other problems were addresses. So, over time the roads were built up to 10metres higher than the footpaths and building entry levels. People used to use ladders to climb up to the road, cross over and go down ladders to continue shopping. That would be fun in crinoline, hoop skirts and button-down high heels. The tour took us into the resultant underground where the business of the city continued above us and we walked through the old front doors of shops and businesses and looked up through some of the 2000+ skylights that were put into the footpaths when the road/path nexus was fixed by putting in footpaths at the new road level. This effectively created an underground.

Skylight for underground
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The history of the city is a fascinating one as it coped with foundations based on sawdust, rubble from the fires, debris from the levelling process and thousands of Douglas firs used as foundation piers. After the fires, the method of providing the rubble for the levelling was to use the mining technique of water blasting the tops of hills and making them lower while collecting the mud in between walls of rock.

There were scandals, profits and rogues in public and in private life.

That’s enough of the history lesson. On to our trip.

height of wall beside footpath where we stood.
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There is no more to tell. Off to San Francisco tomorrow.