Seattle – Up north, it’s a lot greener

I left the cold of summer in San Francisco for Seattle, further up the coast and my last stop in the U.S before heading into Canada and crossing the continent. I was only stopping in town for a couple of days, but regardless I was looking forward to some relaxing and taking in the sights and sounds of the city.

Seattle is a strange one. I know that I’ve wanted to visit for a long time, but when I try and think of why I always end up feeling a little unsure. Fact is the most likely reason is probably T.V and movies, which is hardly surprising considering the realisation I came to shortly after arriving in America about how conditioned my image of the country and expectations were.

I was also a massive Seattle Supersonics fan growing up, back when I still enjoyed playing sports and before I discovered smoking! Between that and an infatuation with certain movies and T.V series, I realised when I planned this trip that I really wanted to visit Seattle, even if I couldn’t quite put my finger exactly on why. Tipping me over, I knew someone here who offered to put me up and show me around, which is always a bonus. Massive shout out to Alex for the hospitality and all round generosity, Seattle would just not have been the same without you bro!

There was one thing I noticed as soon as I landed in America and which I forgot to mention in my last post about San Fran: Spanish. Shortly after landing in San Fran I started hearing people speaking Spanish, and taking the BART into town I saw that all the signs were written in English and Spanish. I know Spanish is the second language in America, and that the Hispanic population the biggest, and I guess in a way most important, ‘minority’ but I didn’t realise to what extent this went until I got there.

What’s even funnier, to me anyways, is that even in Seattle, Washington state, thousands of miles form the Mexican border, everything was still written in Spanish and English. Seeing a bilingual sign on the bus in Seattle made me chuckle in a way, because while I expected it and understood it in California, where there’s a huge Hispanic presence, it just seemed odd in Washington state, a few hundred miles from the Canadian border, and pretty removed from Mexico as far as I was concerned.

As I came to realise at that point, and later on in my trip, Spanish is to America what French is to Canada. A de facto second language that is written pretty much everywhere you go and taken for granted, but which most of the majority population doesn’t speak.

Anyways, getting back to Seattle and the north west coast, while San Fran hit me as cold even in summer, Seattle and Washington state hit me as pretty damn green. Everywhere I looked, green hills, forests and more green broken up by bodies of water. It definitely felt very much like a place that was inbued with nature, not necessarily by choice, but the city and the way it spread had definitely seemed to embrace the fact that all around was very abundant and verdant.

I spent the best part of the first day on a massive bike ride around town, courtesy of Alex who not only hooked up some gangster, old school racing bike, but also took me on a 5h ride of all the essential spots in town. Now you might think, and you may be partly right, that the essential spots in Seattle might be a pretty short list. But that’s not say there isn’t a lot to see. Because trust me there is.

For a start, Seattle seems to be home to its fair share of famous dead people. There’s Kurt Cobain, whose house we checked out before having a good laugh at some of the stuff written on the bench outside it. The bench seems to be the main focus of any pilmigrage to the area, and let’s just say that it holds a fair amount of interesting engravings. And there’s also Bruce and Brandon Lee, who are both buried in Seattle, which I knew but had forgot. Ok so that’s just 3 famous people I saw, but I’m sure there’s more and I think we can all agree they’re pretty ‘famous’. Plus Bill Gates lives in the area, though ok he’s not dead. Anyways…

The bike tour started with a stop at a greenhouse that hosts a specimen of one the world’s stinkiest plants, well on its way to a smelly bloom when we stopped to see it. Missed the bloom by about a week, but maybe that was for the best. The other main spots we hit up included the ubiquitous needle tower, the Sonics’ arena, and a couple of really sweet vantage points that allowed for some amazing views of the downtown area and surrounding scenery.

Overall the ride just reinforced this whole sense of nature I had after arriving. Most of it took place in leafy suburbs, through little forests or by the water, and it’s easy to see why people would want to live in a spot like Seattle. It definitely has that best of both worlds thing going for itself, with a pretty big town center surrounded by nature, so you can escape in no time and find yourself in calmer surroundings. The suburbs and surrounding areas were pretty nice too, very calm and quiet, like something out of the movies or T.V, again. But it was hard to shake the feeling due to how neat and well laid out it all looked: the houses, the trees, the lined up cars and the little town centers with shops, coffee houses and banks.

The ride was facilitated by Seattle’s impressive biking lanes, which spread throughout the city, from downtown to the suburb, allowing to pretty much cycle around the entirity of the city without needing to go on the road. Another neat thing I’d first noticed in San Fran was that buses are equipped with bike holders at the front, so you can actually still hitch a ride even if you’re on a bike. Something which is so simple and obvious, I wonder why the hell it hasn’t been implemented in Europe. I don’t think we paid more either for the bus ticket, and the whole system seems to work like a charm, a couple of bikes can fit at the front of the bus, and putting them on and taking them off is pretty painless.

Talking of coffee houses, for me they were actually a pretty interesting aspect of Seattle, mainly because there seemed to be one around every corner. Considering Starbucks’ worldwide dominance of the whole coffee thing, you’d think the town it originated from might be a little spared in a sense, but no there’s more coffee houses than you can imagine, including plenty of Starbucks-alike, who as I learnt also originated from Seattle. And surprisingly they all seem to do pretty good business. While I’m not one for the whole coffee house thing, especially the American style ones, they’re pretty much the only spots you can get free wi fi and a decent drink in. As I spent some time in one of them during the afternoon, I realised just how different the coffee houses in America seemed to be from the ones you see abroad. The ones in Seattle, and later on some of the ones I visited in Canada and New York, had more of a local feel to them, with locals chatting away, students working and families taking a break, kids running around, etc… It reminded me of the cafes back in Europe in a way, but with a twist (and I ain’t talking about the no smoking considering that’s pretty much a standard everywhere these days it seems).

There’s no doubt that there are plenty of out-the-box coffee houses, formulaic and pretty devoid of any feel or identity, but there are also a lot more that have a feel to it that I’ve never really experienced, because abroad they are a chain and they just aren’t the kind of places you go to for that ‘local’ experience. In North America though some of them tend to go for a much more local-based approach, offering more than just coffee and food like everywhere else. Between the dedicated service and the home made delicacies, it’s hard not to feel a little more relaxed and at ease, though there’s still a defining element of uniformity as you look around you and realise that it has the same surface look and feel as any other American coffee house in the world. You’ve just got to dig a little deeper to find the comfort, as it seems the locals do.

Now while Seattle doesn’t have a lot of tourist attractions past a few obvious ones, one thing Alex did show me was this really cool outdoor art/exhibition space near the docks. It reminded me of parts of Mile End in East London actually, where they had something similar: reclaimed space turned into a small park and dotted with modern art sculptures and installations. This place was just like that but even more surreal, with an installation of giant traffic cones, a metal tree and other strange and surreal modern art pieces that actually fit the surroundings quite well, with the water on one side and the downtown area and the needle looming over on the other side.

Within that area was also a separate art installation of sorts, where they’d actually brought in a fallen tree trunk from the surrounding woodland and housed it in a small room of sorts where it was being kept in similar conditions to its natural habitat but allowed to decompose in front of people’s eyes. Well I don’t know about in front, considering the amount of time it takes for a huge tree trunk to decompose, but the idea seemed to have been to take part of the nature back into the city and explore how fallen trees help to keep the forest alive by becoming a part of their environment and feeding new life, new trees etc… quite why you’d want to do this by taking the fallen tree trunk from its habitat escaped me, as well as the lady who worked there. Even more funny was her remark about how the guy who’d got the idea for this had wanted to put some glass windows to allow people to look into the earth beneath the trunk, only to realise that what happens there only does so because there is no exposition to light and that as soon as you put a window pane and let light in, everything pretty much stops and all you see is earth. I guess that’s art for you.

Coming back to this feeling of community, that was another really nice thing about Seattle which I didn’t really get to see or experience much in San Fran. Hanging around the area where Alex lived in the afternoon, about 20 minutes from downtown or so, you got a real sense that there was a local community vibe, like you get in certain parts of London or like I experienced living in the suburbs of Tokyo. And while it definitely had an American element to it, from the architecture to the shops and street layout, it still felt like something that was quite unique and appealing. It made me realise how Seattle really is the kind of town where, as I mentioned before, you can be a part of the city but also have a feeling of being a little removed.

As I prepared to leave for Vancouver, I got to thinking about another really obvious element of America, size. America is the land of big, a pretty well ingrained idea in the minds of most foreigners and visitors, but one that doesn’t fully ring true until you’re there and you witness it in all its grandiosity and extravagance.

The food portions is the one everyone always mentions, though I must be honest I didn’t find all the food to be really oversized. I think it depends a lot on where you go and the quality of the spot. The burrito I had in San Fran was huge, but it was also incredibly tasty and well prepared. In comparison we had a huge pizza in Seattle, which was definitely more quantity than quality. Overall though, I did find that you can avoid the pitfalls of too much food if you try and steer clear of the bigger chains and standard American foods. At the same time I did also notice a definite movement towards more healthy-sized portions which seemed to go hand in hand with a move for healthier ingredients in the food. Considering I was visiting two fairly ‘progressive’ cities I’m not trying to imply that it’s a countrywide thing (especially considering that both coasts are only representative of a minority of the overall American population), but it did surprise me how much of an effort there seemed to be at various levels to try and improve the health of the food – from the hostels I stayed in, to coffee houses serving cakes and baked products made from organic products to restaurants serving reasonable portions as opposed to plates big enough to feed a family of four.

Going back to the size thing though, it’s not just in the food. The buildings are another obvious one, with the downtown areas scraping up into the sky but also the malls, which in America are most definitely another expression of the American ‘big’, sprawling across huge areas, with parking lots just as big. What was interesting about the malls for me is that for the last 2 years or so, while living in Asia, I got used to ‘vertical’ malls, spread upwards, across countless floors. Something you don’t really get in the U.S, where malls are spread horizontally, with two floors at most. I actually only spent about 10 minutes in a mall, but while there we discussed the whole mall thing, how bland, and uniform they were, and I remarked this difference between Asian (and some European) and U.S malls much to the surprise of my American friends. It’s a logical thing really, there’s less space in Asia, so they go up rather than spread out, but they still are the same as any mall anywhere.

My couple of days in town were probably not enough to truly get a good sense of the city, but even then in the small time I spent in Seattle I saw and experienced a lot, and it served as a really nice warmer for what I would see and experience in Vancouver over the following week. Seattle definitely had more of a small town feel to it, even tough it is pretty big, with its different neighbourhoods and areas all having a charm of their own. Taking the bus across the border to Vancouver, I got to see a bit more of Washington state, and the whole green theme continued, with some stunning scenery and landscapes, bathed in the afternoon sunlight. The north west coast may not be the most happening place, but it does have an incredible natural charm and appeal to it, something I’d always seen and read about and which was even more impressive and seductive in reality than I ever thought it would be.