Seattle again. Besides work for Microsoft and a coffee with Werner Vogels (CTO of Amazon.com), some time to check out Seattle. Jansen is out with the Hoek family, and I took the bus from Kirkland to Seattle and got out at the first stop in downtown. Decided to explore by foot. Always enjoy walking through cities, because you better experience it then. So I went for a semi-touristic tour: going to the Seattle landmarks, but since I didn’t know the way, just relying on my pigeon instinct and a small map. After visiting the Space Needle and a walk to Qwest Field, visiting a lot of shops, galleries, boutiques and doing present-shopping, I took a cab to Capitol Hill, a neighborhood ‘I should really check out’ according to some people I met. It is the center of gay life in Seattle. It also has a reputation as the heart of trendy Seattle, and was the neighborhood most closely associated with the grunge scene, although most of the best-known music venues of that era were actually located slightly outside the neighborhood.

It was the total opposite of downtown. While downtown was formal, Capitol Hill was not. Simple example: I saw nobody smoking on the streets downtown except for some homeless people and in Capitol Hill people were standing smoking in small groups on every street corner. It was simply far less fast paced. Visited a couple of nice stores there. And while doing that and on my way to another, it started to rain. Heavy, heavy rain. So, I ran into the first bar I saw, named Bimbo’s Bitchin Burrito Kitchen. It was filled with the most outrageous people with masks and tattoos everywhere. Later I learned that there was a tattoo convention or something. Anyway, I felt a bit intimidated, thought of ordering a coke but ordered a beer to blend in more. And also bought a beer for a guy, who was sitting at the bar and looked kinda down with his head in his arms. That beer made him look up, and was possibly the best thing I did. We started talking and he told me he was a student, living in the neighborhood. And offered me a ‘grunge-tour’. The rest of the day we spent waling through alley’s to places where grunge things took place, houses of people I never heard of, to venues where bands were rehearsing and had several great talks.

Seattle rocks. Really.

For more, see also the Flickr slideshow.