Seattle Touristy Stuff 2

On Thursday, I met up with Hai Pei who is in the US for 9 weeks by flying around many of the capital cities. We decided to meet at the space needle, which is the iconic tower you see in almost all photos of Seattle (not to mention the silhouette of buildings in Fraiser). The thing isn't really that big, only about 184 meters tall, almost half the size of seattle's tallest building the Columbia Center, at 286 meters tall. I've always liked to see the cities I visit from an ariel point of view.

On the way up in the elevator we were told this was the slower of the two, which I thought was a little strange because the trip to the top was really quick. Hai Pei told me that a VIP ticket of some kind allowed you to get the fast elevator, but when the slow one took like 2 minutes, what's the point? People must be really impatient, have too much money or that VIP ticket had something else going on.

On the way, we got a complimentary photo of us on the space needle. Or rather us in front of a blue screen where we could later change our background to various selection of photos. Seemed a little strange to have a photo souvenir of your time at the Seattle Space Needle, but for it to be ultimately photoshopped.

Me at the top of the Seattle Space Needle

Anyway, the view was pretty spectacular, the weather was fine but a little hazy, so we couldn't see the famous Mount Rainer (which is really cool by the way, sticks out very clearly on the horizon as it is the most topographically prominent mountain in the US). But I did manage to get a fair few photos and try out my recently purchased SLR (and its zoom range).

Outside shot of the EMP Museum

We then went to the EMP Museum, which has a weird mix of music and science fiction exhibits. The building itself is odd looking, lots of sheet metal went in to it. If you ever look at the "archetecture" wallpaper pack in windows 7, one of those shots is of this building (thanks to Josh who told me that).

Inside the museum we looked at exhibits about Nirvana, The Rolling Stones, AC/DC and Jimi Hendrix - unfortunately all artists that Hai Pei and I weren't big fans of. But the exhibitions were well put together! The coolest stuff in the music sections was the place where the were multiple recording booths for a number of instruments (guitar, keyboard, drums, vocals) where you could play and learn a few basic skills. There was also a turntable thing that I thought was pretty cool.

Part of the giant guitar
sculpture at the EMP museum

Another pretty awesome thing was the sculpture mad out of guitars. This was from memory some sort of tribute to Jimi Hendrix. The guitars were meant to play themselves, but they seemed to be ineffectually flagellating themselves, I'm guessing the music had been disabled because it was too loud?

The sci fi exhibits seemed much smaller, but they had a whole exhibit to avatar, one on horror movies and one called "science fiction icons". The science fiction icons had some pretty cool stuff (if you're into that sort of thing), including the captain's chair from Star Trek (original series, unfortunately you couldn't sit in it!), Neo's coat from matrix revolutions, a Darlek from Dr. Who (really dodgy up close, made out of wood and looked like a school kid made it, however that makes sense from the kind of budget Dr. Who had) and a robotic skull from Terminator 2.

Apparently the robots for T2 were
modeled on my gigantic head

By far the best thing in the museum was this cool "art" piece that looked like it was altering your shadows. You stand in front of it and your shadows would distort and weird appendages (nothing suss, this is a family oriented place!) would appear on them. For example, if you made a circle with your fingers, an eyeball would appear in it. It had a big light behind it to give the illusion that it was a shadow, but really there was a camera in the front recording your movements and a projector displaying the "shadows" on the wall. Very cool though!

We the headed to the famous "Pike's Place" markets. Here they have a store where they throw fish (and hundreds of tourists with cameras out trying to get a shot of it), lots of market stores, chowder and a wall full of used chewing gum.

After a brief walk through the markets (neither of us are market people) and seeing a fish being thrown we went and looked the gum wall. With no background info available, I'm guessing this just started out as a wall a lot of people disposed their gum onto and then grew into a tourist attraction. I think you are encouraged to "make a donation" - I would have - but I didn't really want to touch the wall! Hai Pei was pretty disgusted generally, you could defiantly smell the gum as well!

Afterwards, we thought it'd be appropriate try the famous Pike's Place chowder. This would be interesting for a person who couldn't ever recall ever having chowder.

Now there were 8 types of chowder available, in 3 different sizes. Or you could get a selection of 4 small chowders for about 10 bucks. As we wanted to make sure we had the most fulfilling Seattle experience possible, we arranged it so we both got the 4 pack samplers and ended up being able to taste all of the chowders. The busker out the front thought this was very amusing.

Pike's place chowders - all of them

Anyway, they were all very good but most of them were extremely rich and creamy. I couldn't imagine having a large bowl of many of them, it'd be like drinking a bowl of pouring cream!

I think the best one was the 2nd top from the left in the picture on the right. I think it was called the "manhattan clam chowder" or something?

Next we went to the original Starbucks for frappacinos. I should've got a coffee to determine whether the original Starbucks has the same mediocre coffee as the rest of them, but it was too hot! The frappacino was good though, I'll just have to not get addicted to them like I did in Europe!

The original Starbucks