Seattle Attractions Part I

In my previous post I wrote about all the glorious food we ate in Seattle (and I'm going to talk about it more - there was just too much delicious stuff to fit into one rant!), so now it's time to move on to the attractions. We stayed in a hotel just a few blocks from the Space Needle and all the surrounding shops, so our first stop was the food court right next to that most famous of Seattle's sites. There was a convention of some sort going on celebrating Asian Pacific Islander heritage, so we go to see a neat show with music on the center stage while we tried to figure out which of the many mini-restaurants to snag a quick a lunch from before going exploring. The variety in the food courts is astounding! Thai, Indian, Mexican, seafood, Italian, sandwiches, burgers, Chinese, sushi, anything you can think of they have in abundance. I tried a seafood place called Steamers, which was the first food court restaurant I'd ever seen that offered glasses of wine. They had a surprisingly wide selection for their size, and their shrimp and fries were great!

We took the monorail down to the Westlake Center, which has an even larger food court with yet more varieties of food to sample. On our last day there I went to the sushi stand and got to sample octopus and raw red snapper, which are probably both acquired tastes because of their rubbery texture, but I enjoyed them, especially with a little wasabi. The monorail is a fun trip if you get a driver who likes to talk about the history of Seattle. We took the monorail many times and had wildly different experiences depending on who was working it. The original monorail car from the 1960's is the one still in use today. Some of the best sites to see downtown are within walking distance of the Westlake Center, like Pike Market, the waterfront, and a whole lot of shopping.

We each bought the Seattle City Pass, which offers entrance into a variety of attractions for around half or less of the normal price. After checking out the sites around downtown our first location to use the City Pass was the Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum, which happened to be right back where we'd come from, directly next to the Space Needle. While it's called the "Music" project, it's really the "Hendrix" project because about seventy percent of the place is dedicated to information about Jimi Hendrix and his music. The coolest thing about the museum was the guitar sculpture, which was a giant collection of connected musical instruments (mostly guitars) that winds all the up from the floor to the ceiling of the second floor. There is also a recording studio where people can record different instruments or vocals, and then buy a CD of their recording.