Full Metal Lunchbox

Justyna and I got back from a 2½ day vacation in Seattle Monday night, and we had a terrific time.






(This post has been revised to include pictures.  Sorry it took so long.  For more, see Justyna's blog.  I finished this post more than a week after coming home from the trip but will publish with original time stamp.)

Justyna took me to Seattle to celebrate my 37th birthday, and it is far and away the best present anyone has ever gotten me.  We stayed downtown at the luxurious Hotel Monaco and spent our time walking all over town, exploring neighborhoods and visiting with our friends Nicola, Laura, and Jameson.












Staying at the Monaco was a wonderful treat!







After picking us up from the airport, Nicola joined us in our suite for some Italian wine (courtesy of Kathleen and Shea).  Eventually, late that night, we went out to Rock Bottom Brewery for a meal so terribly horrible that I shall mention it no further.  Thank God the food we ate the rest of the weekend was much better.






We spent much of our first day exploring the Pike Place Market.














Without a doubt, this is my absolute favorite urban tourist destination.  We could have easily spent the entire weekend browsing from shop to shop, people watching, and snacking.










Justyna buying mushrooms







endless rows of beautiful flowers









Lots of charasmatic fish mongers.

The night we got back to Chicago Justyna made us a delicious meal of Pike Place crab and exotic mushrooms.





After Pike Place we took a leisurely stroll over to Pioneer Square.


We had planned to go on the "underground tour," but decided that was lame and time-consuming.  Instead we hung out in Seattle's oldest bar (see left), ate fish tacos, visited a strange post-modern urban waterfall, and generally bummed around the area.

Very relaxing, very fun.





We eventually made it back to our hotel just in time to get ready for dinner.


Nicola picked us up and we drove over to Capitol Hill to meet my old friend Jameson, who suggested that we dine at Crave.

This was not only the best meal we had all weekend, but one of the best we have enjoyed in recent memory.

Jameson even brought along a bottle of that Can Feixes he is always talking about, and it was superb!








Whoever thought that "Honey Bucket" was a good brand name for a portable toilet?  These things are apparently all over the Seattle area.





On Sunday we ambitiously decided to walk from our Hotel to Fremont by way of the Science Center.







We didn't go up in the Space Needle.














We also didn't ride the monorail, though we did stop to photograph the Experience Music Project building at the monorail's terminus.













We walked along the western shore of Lake Union and saw lots of houseboats grouped together into little neighborhoods.












We finaly reached the Fremont Bridge













View of Lake Union from the Fremont Bridge (facing southeast)

Lake Union doubles as an airport for seaplanes.  We watched several take off and land.






Fremont was pleasant and interesting, but had nothing of the urban edge we were expecting.







View of the Fremont neighborhood from atop the bridge, facing east.

If you enlarge this picture and look closely you can spot a seaplane coming in for a landing on Lake Union.









Statues of commuters waiting at a stop on a streetcar line that no longer exists, thus blending Seattle's two favorite topics of conversation: art and the shortage of public transportation.







The Fremont Sunday Market

Not bad for a neighborhood flea market, I suppose.

I bought a cool hat (which I lost and am still trying to replace) and Justyna purchased some nice soaps.







Ecclectic poster art, typical of Fremont















The Fremont Troll












From Fremont we walked east along the northern shore of Lake Union.



We stopped along the way to visit Nicola at his house in Wallingford, a nice quiet neighborhood on a hill overlooking the water.





Twenty minutes further walk east and we were at the university.  The neighborhood around the school contained all the edginess we had been expecting in Fremont, and then some!







After enjoying the sidewalk raving lunactics and some Japanese snacks, we took a break from being tourists to go to the movies and see MirrorMask--a film we missed in Chicago because it played for like two days and then disappeared.

The theatre was so chilly and the movie so visually stimulating that I almost had a seisure.










For our final dinner Nicola and his wife Laura took us to Ivars for seafood.






The atmosphere was pleasant and the view out the window across the water was stunning.

The salmon I ordered, however, was somewhat underseasoned.

(At least it was better than the Rock Bottom Brewery.)







The next morning we got up early for one more stroll through the Pike Place Market before heading for home.






As our plane circled the airport to gain altitude for the flight to Chicago, I looked out the window and could have sworn I saw the Fremont Troll wave goodbye.