Taming cats

Yay gods. Time is slipping from underneath me at ridiculous speed. Portland literally went by in a Flash. First experience: “Bro-Dog”, with complementary American flag.

The rest of Portland:

• It’s the most tattooed and pierced place in the US and by extension possibly the planet. And all I can think of is: what is that going to look like when you’re 60? (Is “Lord of the Rings” still going to be cool?) According to a local article, “deviant” behavior starts kicking in (statistically, significantly) after the 4th tattoo. Just so you know.
• Powell’s bookstore. This monster takes up 1 entire city block. I finally picked up “The Life of Pi” and stumbled upon “Endgame” by Samuel Beckett.
• Bought a supercool 50ies style small brim fedora hat to hide my unwieldy hair.
• We saw two magnificent shows at “The Woods”: a folky band named “Run On Sentence” and top-of-the-line improvisation theater (long) by “The Liberators”. The Woods itself is a reconverted funeral home, retaining much of its original majesty.
• Hosted by the wonderful Emerson and Jamie who made us delicious pancakes and raced with us through the rain on our bikes.
• Wandering for an hour through the woods, which turned out to be the “small park”. Insane.

After all of this wonder, we hopped onto a “Superliner”, which is essentially an American dubbeldecker train-on-steriods.

The worst things about trains in the US?

• Ridiculous amounts of paperwork and checkpoints to go through.
• Slow, slow, slow.
• Barely cheaper than taking a plane. Worst of all was the fact that the prices changed (for the worse) while we were booking it. Bleuh!

Best parts about trains in the US?

• Old, so therefor incredibly charming stations and cars.
• Onboard: a parlour car, a restaurant (serving fresh food!), a bar, an arcade room (with games from the 60ies, yay!), a magnificent reading room with high windows and even a movie theatre.
• Room, room, room.
• A wine tasting!
• Watching the sun go down and back up without once having to get off.

Conclusion: these trains shouldn’t be looked at as transportation, but as an experience. (It was kind of what I imagine a cruise ship to be like.)

So. Seattle. Strange town. On the one hand I discovered it is the home city of not only Microsoft, but Boeing and Starbucks as well. And yet it is also full of bearded men playing the banjo. This post is spanning 3 days, so expect some length. (Actually, I have no idea what you expect having turned off the comments section. If you want to, mail me with a funky question at thomas@[the domain you're looking at]) and I promise to feature it in the next post!

First things first: I had actually planned on snowboarding this trip. Now, unfortunately there is a thing called climate change, so the irony is that my home town has seen the most snow ever and over here it’s… uhm… raining softly on the worst of days. Considering the state of the slopes so far, not much has happened in this area. However: adversity breeds opportunity. It turns out, this is the perfect opportunity to try out something on my list of “old fashioned hobbies”. (I discovered a couple of years ago that anything people were doing 100 years ago I usually love doing myself: tango, horse riding, fencing: did it, done it, loved it.) So, there were a few things still on my list, including… climbing. And so, we did.

As expected, we absolutely loved it. We loved it so much in fact, that we’ve done it twice in two days. Yes, I’m a bit sore now.

Let’s go back to Boeing however. Now, as a a kid I was actually not very much into cars, but airplanes? Oh yes. As it turns out, Seattle has this thing called the “Museum of Flight” which is actually even cooler than the Smithsonian in Washington. Let me tell you why. First off all, they have this thing:

That is a freaking Concorde. The fastest commercial planes ever built. The 4 Rolls Royce engines underneath? Massive. Going into the plane itself was my first taste of magic. Next to it there was this little puppy:

That is an “airforce 1″. This beauty transported Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon (amongst other people). It has an on board safe which at the time held the launch codes to enough nuclear bombs to wipe out humanity several times over:

Yes, it feels a bit weird thinking about it when you’re standing next to it. (Click on one of the pictures to see more stuff.) Anyway. The final piece, the mother of all boys dreams. The airplane of airplanes. I present to you the SR-71, aka the “Blackbird”:

This is to this date still the fastest manned aircraft ever built (Mach 3.2, more than 3 times the speed of sound). “If a surface-to-air missile launch were detected, standard evasive action was simply to accelerate.” Literally faster than a bullet. The “ceiling” (highest flying altitude of these monsters) was about 24 km. In any case, I got to sit in the cockpit of one, fulfilling my childhood dreams and making this trip worth it all on its own.

In about 6 hours we have to catch a train (yes, they do have trains in the US) to Portland. Very exciting.

My second morning in Seattle, eating gummy bears. Keeping up any semblance of a healthy diet is going to be close to impossible I’m afraid.

First explorations of Seattle. A brief visit to the “Experience Music Project“, watching the effect of a virtually limitless budget combined with dubious taste (their own website admits it: “the place where music meets science fiction”, ugh). Walking past the Space Needle, happily saying no to a 17 $ ticket. Walking and talking down-town.

Considering the fact that Seattle is the birthplace of “grunge rock”, it shouldn’t have been so surprising to have the first song we hear on the radio be a Stone Temple Pilots song from somewhere deep in the 90ies. Also: “Even Flow” by Pearl Jam. Oh, the memories. Cut-off green army pants, long hair and teenage angst.

Shocking discovery:  there appears to be a shortage of bitters! Since this is a key ingredient to my world-class Margarita, it made me cry a bit (on the inside). We still made some and they were good, but not as mind-blowing.

Weirdness: Belgium is everywhere! Even the coffee shops here have Duvel now and one bar we went to served 5 kick-ass Belgian beers including my favorite: Chimay Bleu (weirdly renamed as “Chimay Premier” or something). The “Spike & Mike” animation evening at the local movie theater included the proudly absurd “Panique au village”. Belgians do it better (suck it, Flemish nationalists).

And then the money thing. So, I brought some cash to the US, figuring I could exchange it here. Now, as it turns out, they charge you about 5 $ for that. The cashier was then strange enough to point out that I wouldn’t have to pay this fee if I just opened a bank account. About 45 minutes later, I have a bank account, a card, a “lucky tiger” piggy bank and my dollars.

The oddest thing about banking around here is how incredibly insecure it is. They still use checks (haven’t seen those in 15 years) and do online banking with a username and password. (!) Rob came with the explanation: if something goes wrong, it’s “not your problem, it’s the problem of the bank”. In other words, there is no such thing as shared responsibility. One other thing puzzled me: if the bank does all that for free (money exchange, open an account, give presents), how are they ever going to make money off me? Rob to the rescue: by default I can take out more money than I actually have in the account without even getting a warning. In other words, the banks around here are counting on me going into debt “accidentally”. It made me wonder yet again what kind of misery is hidden inside of these houses.

Oh, hey, some pictures have already gone online. I don’t have the equipment here to fully process them, but I’m reasonably happy with the results. I have retro-actively inserted them into the previous blog posts.