Seattle, WA

Seattle Cityscape

Showing us a beautiful blue sky from the Space Needle, Seattle was magnificent from 500 ft. up in the air. We followed this with a street level tour and found many fun places to go and observe. Pike Place Market (see below) was truly candy for the eye, and we spent a fun time at the Experience Music Project Museum (see below). Many of the newest and tallest of Seattle’s skyscrapers are covered in glass, creating some interesting cityscape reflections. Leaving the Space Needle we enjoyed listening to a Panpipe player and his band from South America (movie below).

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Pike Place Market

The crowds were such that we were walking shoulder to shoulder and being carried to the next stall. It was difficult to stop and linger over some of the exquisite displays, the people all wanting to purchase, take pictures, and stand with their favorite fish or vegetable! The seafood on display was particularly memorable. Colors, smells, and fragrances attacked and overwhelmed our senses at every turn. We visited a cheese factory, decided not to queue for access to the original Starbucks and stopped for a quick bite at a local eatery with a view over Puget Sound. Cheryl found a very strange and profound poster in the woman’s bathroom! (see gallery below)

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Experience Music Project (EMP) Museum

EMP’s Pop Art Architecture

Seattle’s EMP Museum was founded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen in 2000, dedicated to contemporary music and pop culture. We found it fun and interesting, giving us ‘double-takes’ at the artwork to make us sure of what we were seeing and experiencing. Besides a Star Trek gallery, there was the guitar pillar which played music, a room as if you were in an electronic game, and amazing ‘Wearable Art’ clothing displays out of many unusual materials. Colin enjoyed the Jimmy Hendricks gallery about his European tour. It brought back memories of listening to ‘Purple Haze’ in a small marquee at his college May Ball.  Experiencing the Hendrix sound a few feet from the band, he can still feel his ears ringing. We listened, saw movies, found references to his England trip, and saw paraphernalia from the band’s traveling days. No less of an influence on both our generations, here was the original Easy Rider motorcycle that Peter Fonda rode in the movie of the same name. (Other inspiration for our road travel have been the well known: Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, and particularly for Colin, Alistair Cooke’s Letter from America which he listened to every week on the radio as a boy.)

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Quichua Machis playing near Seattle’s Space Needle

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