walking through Seattle with friends

I set my alarm for 8:45 am because I want to trade work for another night in the hostel, but when I find the housekeeping manager she is busy training her new employee and she tells those of us looking for work that she no longer needs any help.  Bummer.  I pay for my room and then head out the door after a quick egg whites breakfast.  I pass by Chocolate Box (a store I have passed twice when it was closed) and head in, since now they are in fact open.  They sell chocolates from all over the world and they serve items such as: drinking chocolate, hot chocolate with orange, white hot chocolate with mint, frozen hot chocolate with peanut butter and gelato in handmade chocolate bowls.  I order two scoops of gelato (one white chocolate scoop and one mint chocolate chip in a tiny handmade chocolate bowl.  I eat my gelato and enjoy every nibble.  Then, I head back to the hostel after perusing the block and find Jason (my sailing friend) and he invites me to to go with him to REI.  We walk through the city together and check out both Feathered Friends (an expensive outdoor store with very expensive gear and lots of down items (sleeping bags and jackets).  We head to the Seattle REI, which is huge!  It is a really nice building, with attractive bike paths, walking paths, and a manmade waterfall outside.  The building has big timbers outside and a huge climbing area inside near the floor to ceiling fireplace.  I am impressed!  I search around, but alas I have no real need for new gear, but the place has so much, it is fun to talk with the gear experts and look at things I can usually only find online.  It is comical really, when I find out that REI's annual HUGE garage sale was this past Saturday and Sunday when I easily could have attended had I known about it!  So, I look at the one remaining rack of used gear for sale and find a nice cycling layer for $7.49.  After our walk we return to the hostel, check email and then head out again.  We look through the market, check out few shops and then find ourselves at the Chocolate Box again where I get peanut butter frozen hot chocolate.  I just had to have it!  Then, after more wandering about exploring Seattle we go to the Seattle Brewing Company for my veggie burger and his salmon sandwich.  We talk for a while and then go to the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory for rice crispy peanut butter goo.  I am so full from dinner that I just stash my dessert in my room for tomorrow...I don't think I could eat anything else tonight.  When I get back to the hostel I watch the end of "Zoolander" and then I head out to accompany my Dutch friend for dinner.  I help him carry his wheelchair down the hostel stairs and wheel him around the cobble stone streets.  We end up at an African restaurant where I sit and talk while he tries to figure out how to eat his food without silverware.  We return to the hostel by 8:40 pm and play online to the background music of the hostel's open mike night.  Some of the music is decent, some is lousy...but I spend the night with my two friends looking at horrific kite boarding crashes on u-tube and discussing Dutch football (soccer).  Then at 11:30 pm the hostel announces the evening activity is at a bar specializing in pinball machines.  A group of twenty people join us as we head out through downtown.  I only play one game of pinball, but I watch my friends and then play some Pac man games before we head back to the hostel an hour later and all head to our rooms exhausted.

Shopping for outdoor gear between meals of chocolate just seems wrong, but somehow perfect.