Tourism

One of the side effects of the Seattle greyness is that it turns the entire town agoraphobic until the sun comes out. This means that not only can we get pizza delivery, but Amazon will deliver grockeries from PCC and Uwajimaya in 2 hours or less for the same price as visiting the locations. If you don't want to cook, then they will bring deliciousness from neighbourhood restaurants, and you need never leave your house or interact with strangers. (They have a box you can check to tell them to leave it on the porch in order to avoid the potential horrors of social interaction.)

What all of this means is that I haven't been getting out of the house very often, except when I am volunteering. I have been spending the bulk of my time buried in outdated internet law books for my Cyberlaw course, most of which were written before 2000. In any other field, this would be like reading a text from the 1890's and expecting it to apply. Needless to say, since they are law texts, they are also soporific. I tend to only leave the house if I have company or a compelling need (read: ice cream emergency), and most of my friends have either moved, are nesting in the suburbs, or are agoraphobic, misanthropic hermits. (No, mother, you cannot paint their shells).

SO in the spirit of fresh air and adventure, I decided to try to spend a little time each week exploring the city and taking pictures. Most of my photos are of exotic locales, and I have very few of the local area, so I'm going to try to remedy that.

What better place to start than the center of the known universe: Fremont. Fremont (which I have today learned is named after Fremont, Nebraska), bills itself as an art community. I sort of doubt any starving artists can afford to live here, so I think it is mostly populated with posers and trust-funded "artists."



Fremont is the sort of aggressively quirky are that people in the northwest love to create. Its sort of like Little Portland. There is a lot of public art, especially statues, and during the solstice there is a naked bike parade. First and foremost among the sculturey is Lenin. He inhabits a corner, and seems to be perpetually trying to cross the street.

If Lenin seems like a strange icon for an artsy community, never fear. Vandals/revolutionaries/cubans generally make sure his face and hands are painted red, and today he sports a fancy "murderer" label. I think the red represents the blood of the people. At least that's what it would represent if I was the vandal. Or raspberry jam. Or candy apples. Yeah, definitely candy apples. 

Lenin stares longingly at the Red Star Taco Bar across the street. The morning is super grey, so I decided to stop in and have a drink and see if things would perk up. They didn't.

It was just as grey when I left, but at least I was full of Sangria. I was the only customer in the place, and to their credit, they didn't question the fact that I ordered a drink at 11:30. No wonder Lenin likes this place.  Maybe its the sangria of the people on his hands. 

Fremont also has some cool neon on some of the buildings, but it isn't very exciting during the day time. The High Dive has a woman plunging from their roof onto the sidewalk. It seems like a terrible message, but I guess there is no accounting for Art.

The street people here are also artistic. This sculpture belongs to a guy named Benny, who stacks and balances rocks in exchange for spare change. I was here last year and there were only three or four rocks, now it is a fullblown arch. There is no mortar involved, just lots of time and balance.

Around the corner is Theo Chocolate. I had heard that they had an interesting tour of the factory, with no-golden ticket required. I thought maybe I would do that and take pictures. 

Then I walked in and saw a) people gearing up in hairnets, b) the cost ($10) and c) the sign across the street. Obviously C was the most appealing of these options, so I set off to taste whiskey, vodka, and gin instead of chocolate. 

Apparently there was some confusion about the distillery. "WE'RE OPEN" says the door. "We're closed Monday" says the sign....

"Drink more whiskey!" says Mark Twain. I'd love to Mark, but it seems the door is a dirty, drunk liar! Mischief indeed. 

I made my way back towards the chocolate factory, where I managed to blend in with a group coming out of the tour and get some free samples. (None of which tasted like Schnozzberry). I also got to see some chocolate dinosaurs. 

Dinos have apparently become some sort of leitmotif here in Fremont. In addition to chocolate form, I also saw them in hedge form, guarding the canal...

...and in what I can only assume is Solid Gold Plastic in one of the nearby shops. They also featured prominently in graffiti, but most of that wasn't interesting/subversive enough to photograph. 

Across from the chocolate factory is the wall the Fremont Outdoor Cinema uses to show movies during the summertime. It has become a bit more upscale than it used to be, back when they just showed them on whatever building seemed the cleanest.

The Fremont rocket is another local landmark. It used to be one of the taller things around, but is now surrounded by condos that dwarf it. 

One of the condo buildings has added a planet as a sort of architectural apology, I think. I hope it makes the rocket less size-conscious.

I think one of the rules of the Fremont Business Association must be that your business is required to have quirky signage. 

This shop announces itself as being "The gift shop for the thoughtful procrastinator."

This was my favourite bit of vandal art, and just generally very, very good advice. It was stickered to a utilities box.

The Fremont bridge has been recently painted, and is probably really pretty on a sunny day. 

It has a neon Rapunzel in one of the towers. Because all bridges need that. 

From the bridge you can see a brigade of stabled bicycles that I am assuming belong to google, based on colour.

I went to check out the JP Patches sculpture that has recently been put up. It is actually pretty cool, despite my general dislike of the entire clown race.

It has a second part that is a see-through televison a few feet away, where you can frame up the clowns if you are willing to sit on the pavement with your head at child-height. (of course I was!)

I think one of the most famous statues in Fremont might be this one. People dress it up regularly. Right now it is sporting the remains of a "happy birthday" banner.

On the way out, I paid my respects to the Dumpling Tzar, because I heard they had mac and cheese dumplings, and that seemed like a good take-home lunch. While I waited I got to investigate their buildings. They have turntables and LP's set up. The saavy among you will notice why I took this picture in the lower right. Clearly someone has good taste in music.

And lastly, I took this photo last year, but no Fremont post is complete without the troll under the Aurora bridge. I cross this bridge regularly, and have never been asked for a toll, but maybe that is just because I'm not a billy goat. 

Greenwood Asplode!

So here I was last night. I had just gotten back from the gym and was chilling out, getting ready for bed, about to watch a pirated Rogue Squadron trailer...

Then the whole house jumped. It was probably a monster.

Ok, I will admit I have been reading a lot of Kaiju/Monster/Alien crap as part of the ARG for 10 Cloverfield Lane. This may have influenced my first reaction. My second was to throw a blanket around myself and go outside to see which tree hit my house. (Answer: none trees) At least we can all be happy this particular disaster wasn't addressed in the nude.

Turns out Greenwood asploded last night. This area is about a mile and a half from my house, and the buildings that were leveled are directly across from the place I volunteer. The fact that I felt it enough for my whole house to shake means there was a crazy amount of energy behind this.

Here is a before shot of the area across the street from the Space Travel Supply Store that I took last year:

And here is a screenshot from the Seattle Times Article showing how it looks now from roughly the same angle. You can see the facade of Neptune Coffee against the right hand tree: 

Here is a shot from inside the Space Travel Supply. Basically all the buildings you can see outside the window no longer exist. For that matter, neither do the windows. Apparently most of Greenwood lost its glass.  I am very happy this happened at 1:45 AM instead of PM. 

I had planned to spend today calling around about window replacements for my house and meeting up with some of the other volunteers at a bar in Greenwood. Both those plans are currently on hold... I am guessing glass will be in high demand this week. 

Animals and Heart Attacks

Last April, I took advantage of my student status to purchase a super discounted yearly zoo pass. The day I bought it was apparently the first sunny day of spring break-- the lines were long, and the shrieks were shrill. Toddlers gonna toddle, I guess. I've been waiting for a clear, relatively child-free day since then so that I could practice with my long lens. Here are two of the pictures I took that day. I still can't believe this bear could sleep through the yelling without climbing the Space Needle.







The weather reports this weekend indicated that today might be free-of-rain. I made my plans for a zoo assault. I began prepping early, taking a shower late last night. Singing songs about the Zoo, and washing my hair. That turned out to be the Land of 5000 Heart Attacks. After I turned off the water, I could still hear a slow hiss, which sounded an awful lot like the pipes leaking in the wall. I gave it a few minutes, tried to empty the diverter, turned the water on and off... the usual suspects. Still the sound of water running behind the wall. I combed my hair hoping it would stop. At this point normally my cat would have jumped in the tub and started licking the faucet, but he was staying away as if the water was running.

I checked downstairs to see if water was flooding through the ceiling. Then I did the unthinkable. I called my parents at 11:30PM because I didn't know what else to do. This is tantamount to a National Guard deployment. My father sent me around the house to turn off the water main, then the hot water heater, and to start taking apart the faucet. (All of which was done with me naked and still dripping. You're welcome, my neighbours!) As I finally got the faucet plate off and could see into the wall, something wet and sticky hit my foot. It turned out to be shaving cream. Huh. That's weird, I didnt use any in my shower...

Yeaaaaah, it turned out the watery gurgly hissing sound I was hearing was the ten-year-old bottle of girly shaving cream having finally rusted out enough to let loose its foamy contents. Disaster averted. Also thwarted: sleep for both me and my parents. Hooray for the Zoo!

The weather turned out to be super clear. Here's a view of my neighbourhood from the hill on which the Zoo resides. Or maybe I'm just not used to seeing things this early and it always looks like this. Who knows.



My hope in getting up early was that only the most hardcore of nannies were out of the house at 9AM. It turned out it wasn't too bad. Apparently there's a gang of senior citizen walkers that owns the zoo before noon. They all have special name tags and know each other. Also many of them a) know a lot about the exhibits and layout and b) are like-minded about the shrieking. As the morning wore on, it was a little like being caught between Jet and Shark territory.

I don't like penguins. I think they're the mimes of the bird world. That said, they really like preening and posing for photos. Probably because of all the p's.







The Zoo has a new tiger exhibit which I was excited to see. It went in just last year and was much ballyhoo'd. As with other ballyhoo'd endeavors, it turned out to be a disappointment. There are two viewing areas through which one would be able to see tigers if they wanted to come out. One of the Sharks explained to me that the lions had been recently allowed to expand their territory behind the tiger cage, and now the tigers are constantly trying to get back into their den enclosure, where their mother and father are. If you stood at just the right corner, you could see them pacing back and forth and trying to get home. Lions and tigers only hang out in the same forests in Oz, other than that they're mostly relegated to separate continents. Mostly what I could see was a seething mass of stripes and bamboo.

When I made a second pass by the exhibit on the way out, one of the tigers had given up and was laying on a rock. Excuse the reflections of the garishly clad people standing next to me. Most of these photos are shot through glass, which has its drawbacks in terms of haze and reflection, but beats bars and chain link any day.

Since the tigers were mostly a bust, I headed to the other cats. The jaguar was hiding and eating, but I managed to get a decent picture of him looking up. 

The Snow Leopard had also just finished eating something large and meaty that I like to hope was human, but looked more like a dinosaur. He was looking smug enough to have eaten a toddler though.



Also in the large tails section: some lemurs and wallabies.

This Gorilla looked like he was doing impressions. I'm not sure if it was Bogart or Groucho Marx, or something in between, but it made me laugh. Animals! They're just like us! The rest of the monkeys were also chowing down. It seems that morning is when animals eat, so this was a pretty good time to be there.

This zookeeper was very slowly feeding this sloth, while the meerkats looked on covetously from their enclosure. 

This is a baby Komodo Dragon, who was hiding out in the trees. Flashback to Happy Hour with my parents. 

One of my friends requested lots of wolf pictures. Below is a wealth of wolves, and one warthog. If you want to see the rest of the photos, click here for my Flickr album. The Giraffes were all still in their barn, so I missed seeing most of the Savannah animals. Hopefully next time there is a pre-summer, non-spring-break sunny day I can head back for those.