Barb and Dave's Western Tour: Breathless in Seattle

Seattle - quite a place. We were here two weeks, busy every day, didn't get to see half of it.

We started out staying near Seattle Center Park to meet son Ben, who'd just finished a one-week mountaineering course on Mt Rainier - learning what to do if you fall into an ice cravasse, and such.

We went up the Space Needle, of course, in addition to the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame and
the Experience Music Project, a shrine to rock music in general and Jimi Hendricks in particular. Fine if you really like guitars. The building is supposed to resemble a smashed guitar.

Street musicians abound, most of them pretty good...

These people were Central Americans

Barb with Ben

Dave, Ben and two of Ben's college roommates, Mo and Uevo

Pioneer Square

The Glasshouse Studio - famous, I think, or should be. Beautiful stuff...

The Gold Rush Museum. Seattle benefitted immensely from the Yukon-Alaskan gold rush, being the gateway to Alaska and the Yukon. This exhibit explains what fun it was mining gold in the middle of the winter. You sunk a shaft thru the frozen permafrost to the frozen gravel; heated the ground with hot water to make mud, dug it ou and transported it to the surface, where it promptly froze again. You had to pile it all up and wait for spring to refine it; so you had no idea whether you were mining gold or just dirt until afterwards.

One Million Dollars worth of Gold (well, actually a painted lead model of it): Barb as a miner

This 'game' dramatizes the odds against getting rich: spin the pointer, and if you end up in the little gold sliver, you win. Only about 20% of the 100,000 who started out for the Yukon even did any mining at all. Of those some 300 who actually made a lot of money out of it, all but about 50 of them shortly lost it.

One man who didn't lose it was a Mr Nordstrom, who came back with $5000 and bought two houses and a shoestore. His sons were the ones who did most of the heavy lifting in running it into a chain of department stores.

A totem pole in downtown Seattle

Street people. There are a whole lot of them; apparently they have somewhere to go at night. Mostly young, and probably do this for a few years and then move on. They all know each other.

They're doing a lot of building

Lots of people use bicycles; you can take them on the streetcars

Which may have something to do with how expensive it is to park.

One of the big things is putting lipstick, and all sorts of other things, on pigs.

Gold Pig

When Pigs Fly:

Shopping Pig, at the entrance to the Pike Street Market

Where one of the things to do is watch the guys at the fish market throw fish. Everybody chants as they get ready to do it. They don't seem to drop them, slippery as they are.

There's a beautiful Japanese garden: Zen river, made of gravel

Pond, with urban overcrowding, turtle version

The Museum of Asian Art

More pigs: Fortunate Pig. The little white things are Chinese fortune-cookie slips.

Flower Pig and Bingo Pig

We stayed, in Seattle, with two of Dave's cousins: Bob and Ruth Williams, who'd also put us up in 2002 when Dave and Barb had His and Hers skiing accidents at Whistler, British Columbia and took several weeks to get in shape to travel. Bob and Ruth are both retired from Boeing.

Pat and Ken Cox. Ken was a Vice-president at Puget Sound Power and light; they raised champion collie dogs for years.

Betsy Rigg, on Dave's mother's side.

With Bob and Ruth, we took a side trip to Tacoma, the capital: Menu at the Capital Deli

Mother Joseph, an early missionary who founded schools, hospitals etc.

The central chandelier, by Louis Comfort Tiffany. The Capital claims to have the largest collection of Tiffany glass in the world. A couple of years after this was made, a fire and other setbacks bankrupted Louis Tiffany; the business was carried on by his brother, a jeweler.

The House of Representatives. Displayed are the names of all the delegates, with their votes; they push buttons at their desks. They're all furnished with laptops, and almost everything's done paperlessly. The sessions are all televised.

The Senate (not shown) has one interesting feature: almost all of the deciding about a bill is done in committee. Once it gets on the floor, speeches are limited to three minutes, and are often much less. The record: six words: "Good little Bill. Please vote for."

Then we took a cruise across the harbor to Tillicum Village, on an island

The Waterfront:

Sea likon relaxing on a buoy

Tillicum village

A couple of the dancers

The dances were most interewsting. This is a Paddle Dance. The coast indians have Potlatches, a gigntic feast to which everybody is invited, and guests are given lots of expensive presents - a real display of wealth. In preparation, the giver and some of his friendsw would canoe to the other villages and invite them with this dance (sorry about the lighting. They didn't want us to use flash).