oh seattle...
Oh Seattle, why do you have to be so enchanting? I think at this point I could fall completely in love with any city, since I haven't done enough travelling to really know for sure where I want to be. We definitely had an amazing time there, and since returning to Toronto I have felt kind of gloomy. Who knew that's what travelling would do to me?! Toronto just doesn't have the allure it did before, back when it was the ONLY thing I knew. That makes sense though. Now I want to go everywhere. If only time and money would allow...
(This is not the hotel we stayed at, just a pretty one.)
Seattle seems to care about keeping its history in tact, which is something I appreciate. This is at Pike Place Market, which is so wonderful, for tourists and non-tourists alike. I don't like being a tourist for some reason—and people thought I wasn't one, I kept getting asked for directions and was giving them within a day (guess I'm a city girl for sure). I very shyly took most of these pictures. I don't see myself as a photographer—though I wish I was better at it—so taking out my crappy camera made me feel very touristy. Plus it was super rainy and I didn't want to get it wet. All my pictures came out blurry!
You have to be adventuresome here, because everything good seems tucked away and hard to get to. There were steep hills and alleys and very long staircases everywhere, sometimes I felt like I was trespassing. I visited an antique market right down on the harbourfront (across from the aquarium) which took some effort to get to. Down 200 feet of stairs later... I will show you some of the stuff I bought later!
Pike place again, in the evening. Most of the pictures I took were at night, this was early evening. There are so many neon signs in Seattle, I think almost every store has one. Kind of crazy but also cool, and makes the city light up nicely at night. Plenty of trees wrapped in christmas lights too.
From the first Starbucks, the cashier asked for Jory's name and even spelled it right!
Elliot bay books—I can't even say enough about this place. We were here for hours. Bookstores and coffee shops are a huge thing in Seattle, which naturally we loved. We also went to this nice Japanese bookstore, where I spent way too much money... I bought some magazines, a book with pictures of shops, some stationery and some masking tape.
At Zeitgeist Kunst and Kaffee, a really cool industrial looking coffee shop. My favourite thing about this place was the aluminum industrial lighting, the letterpress green metal type cabinet they had just for show, and the altered books exhibit on the walls.
Oops, sorry for invading this guy's privacy, who was just reading quietly.
(The altered books exhibit on the walls...)
& of course I visited two Anthropologies while there. It's nice to see how different the stores are, and it was also nice to chat with the employees about Toronto. Of course there was plenty to talk about! I was very tempted to buy shoes... (we don't sell their shoes yet in Canada). All the stores were in the middle of setting up their Spring windows, exciting!
Seattle was so wonderful, and there were so many things I liked about it. The gray skies, how close it is to Japan, bookstores and coffee shops, even the transit system is interesting!
Where to next, you ask? Hopefully somewhere just as beautiful, hopefully sometime soon. But for now I will try to rekindle my Toronto love affair by doing some touristy things here.
(More pictures here).
