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.