Seattle Day 1

After touching down in Seattle, Josh and Wendy gave me a lift back to their apartment in their giant, recently purchased charger. This thing is massive, but pales in comparison to some of the trucks driving around here. Americans really do seem to like big cars. It all makes sense however, because much of the driving here is on huge, wide highways. The trip back for the airport consisted of multiple 4-lane beltways.

After stopping by one of the many Mexican fast restaurants for a quick burrito, I headed to bed.

The next day josh took me around some local places in the Redmond area. I wanted to see a Wallmart, so we headed there first. Basically Wallmart is a giant Big W with groceries and guns. What surprised me a little is that the type of guns you can purchase at wallmart are beyond the hunting rifles. I'm no gun fancier, so I can't really tell guns on sight alone, but one of them looked like an AR-15. That's a pretty serious weapon. I'm hoping to go to a gun range sometime in the US, but will have to look at the different state regulations on firearms, some are more restrictive. Only at targets though!

Next up we went to Starbucks for a coffee. As far as I can tell there is not many cafes around here, this may only be a Northern Midwest thing? Starbucks is one of the only places I've seen where you can get espresso coffee. And they are everywhere, even inside the supermarkets. If anyone was wondering, the coffee tastes the same as it does back home (kinda crap but not terrible). They also don't know what a flat white is, so I had to ask for a low-foam cappuccino, which they were happy to make.

That's a 1.75L bottle

Another thing is that I'm not sure why anyone would use cash here, everywhere takes credit cards. And when you use cash, you get all this change back - mostly pennies - as obviously the don't round up to the nearest 5c like in Australia. Also, you always have to keep in mind that the prices do not include government taxes, which vary frome state to state. In Washington this is about 10% and is sales tax, but other states have different kinds of tax and some have multiple taxes they apply. To make things even more difficult some items are not taxed, and others have way larger taxes than everything else.

This is really apparent with hard liqueur, as the tax is something like 20%, which explains why it looks so cheap in the stores. The picture on the right is a price for a 1.75L bottle of Smirnoff. Alcohol here is still ludicrously cheap though.

For lunch I decided to cross out one of the restaurants you hear about a bit in American tv and movies ("I'm so hungry I could eat at Arby's"). Arby's sell roast beef sandwiches which look massively unhealthy in their adverts. I decided to get a classic medium sandwich, which is pretty big from a Aussie point of view. It basically a pure meat burger, where the meat is cut into very thin strips, kind of like in a kebab but much thinner. It has a bit of sauce which makes it a bit sweeter than I was expecting (that seems to be a common theme for American foods).

After lunch Josh and I went to the fancy pants Seattle mall. This mall has a lot kf money. Since redmond is the capital of Microsoft, I had to checkout the Microsoft store. Turns out it was like any other electronic computer store, except they were giving out free t-shirts for anyone willing to use the bing search engine to perform a task. For. Memory it was:

1. Open Internet explorer
2. Search for the seattle sounders (sports team)
3. Prove that big showed the ticket price and that I could purchase a ticket in one click
4. Receive Microsoft store t-shirt

What was funny was there was a large apple store only 2 doors down. Didn't however manage to look at the much hyped "Microsoft surface".

For dinner Josh, Wendy and I decided to head to the outback steakshouse, a supposedly Australian themed chain of restaurants. This was my first experience with the famous American table service, which is supposed to be exceptional due to the tipping system. The young waiter was in training so she screwed up some things, but all in all, it was good. I tipped 15%, which is apparently a "good service" amount (less than what I was originally told). Josh also explained to me that unlike in Australia where you want your winter to bring you your food and drink then basically piss off, american waiters are trained to constantly keep checking on you, asking you if the food is ok and refilling your drinks. He said it can get a little annoying for us Aussies, but you get used to it.

The food itself for the outback steakhouse was good, I had the classic American starter salad and a steak, unfourtunately not the "blooming onion" which I was informed was just a fancy way of serving onion rings. As you may have guessed, there is no real Aussie food on the menu, but I guess they couldn't have a menu full of pie floaters and lamingtons.