"Use a gun... do extra time. Don't use a gun."
Well, Happy Easter everybody - hope you all enjoyed the long weekend.
Last Thursday I went to Whistler which, thank goodness, finally received some snow - 86cms of it in 3 days. It was a welcome change - 2 weekends before the mountains were bare up to the midstation. It was much more encouraging to see some white this trip.
On Saturday went to Seattle - caught the bus down at 9am and didn't arrive in downtown Seattle until 3pm, blame overcautious border security and extremely bad American freeway traffic for the delays. (Note it took us 1.5 hours to get through the border. We were all fingerprinted, photographed, interrogated. Coming back into Canada took 10 minutes... "Where do you live?" "UBC". "OK have a nice day")
But Seattle is a pretty cool city. Dirty, yes. Unsafe, relatively. Too many cars - for sure. The transit downtown though was relatively good - free in the entire downtown area, but the only people that seem to use it are old people and blacks. An advertisement in the bus amused me: "Use a gun. Do Extra Time. Don't use a gun" - as if to say, if you're going to kill someone, please - use a knife, use your fist, even drown them - but just don't use a gun.
Seattle Centre is a tourist precinct off the end of downtown whic houses among other things the EMP, Experience Music Project and SFM, Science Fiction Museum. Both were excellent - at the EMP you could spend a whole day, looking through the history of "northwest" music (home of Nirvana and the entire grunge movement), the Bob Dylan exhibit, make your own music - and even record it and star in your own music video. Rina and I spent a while in a studio honing down our guitar and drum skills. I swear I'm buying a drum kit when I get back home.
Sunday night went to see Washington play Seattle in basketball at Key Arena. Basketball is huge in the States and this was a great game, with Seattle losing by just 1 point... the crowd is great, though extremely partisan. There are cheerleaders, dancers, blimps, and yes lots of hot dogs, pretzels and Bud (which tastes a lot like piss).
The nightlife in Seattle is great - on Saturday night we went to a Jazz bar and drank Martinis, on Sunday we went to the opening of a quasi-hip hop club in trendy Capitol Hill... the sound is a lot more raw in Seattle than Vancouver which is great, the DJs experiment a lot more and the crowd is really chilled. Cabbed it down to a Breaks club which was hosting a DJ comp - this was really great, stuck around there till the early hours. Unlike in Canada you can smoke in clubs in the US, so this reminded me a lot of Sydney.
Did some shopping - much better in Seattle than Vancouver. Cheaper prices, massive malls and department stores - hey, it's America after all. Then arrived back in Vancouver on Monday night and back to the reality of several assignments, exams and presentations due over the next few weeks.
I have photos of Seattle & Whistler to post, but haven't had time yet to shrink them down to blogspot size, so I will get to that soon.
Email me people, I will reply eventually and I really like hearing from you even if I don't acknowledge that for a while.
Until next time (hopefully soon)
-Nick
Last Thursday I went to Whistler which, thank goodness, finally received some snow - 86cms of it in 3 days. It was a welcome change - 2 weekends before the mountains were bare up to the midstation. It was much more encouraging to see some white this trip.
On Saturday went to Seattle - caught the bus down at 9am and didn't arrive in downtown Seattle until 3pm, blame overcautious border security and extremely bad American freeway traffic for the delays. (Note it took us 1.5 hours to get through the border. We were all fingerprinted, photographed, interrogated. Coming back into Canada took 10 minutes... "Where do you live?" "UBC". "OK have a nice day")
But Seattle is a pretty cool city. Dirty, yes. Unsafe, relatively. Too many cars - for sure. The transit downtown though was relatively good - free in the entire downtown area, but the only people that seem to use it are old people and blacks. An advertisement in the bus amused me: "Use a gun. Do Extra Time. Don't use a gun" - as if to say, if you're going to kill someone, please - use a knife, use your fist, even drown them - but just don't use a gun.
Seattle Centre is a tourist precinct off the end of downtown whic houses among other things the EMP, Experience Music Project and SFM, Science Fiction Museum. Both were excellent - at the EMP you could spend a whole day, looking through the history of "northwest" music (home of Nirvana and the entire grunge movement), the Bob Dylan exhibit, make your own music - and even record it and star in your own music video. Rina and I spent a while in a studio honing down our guitar and drum skills. I swear I'm buying a drum kit when I get back home.
Sunday night went to see Washington play Seattle in basketball at Key Arena. Basketball is huge in the States and this was a great game, with Seattle losing by just 1 point... the crowd is great, though extremely partisan. There are cheerleaders, dancers, blimps, and yes lots of hot dogs, pretzels and Bud (which tastes a lot like piss).
The nightlife in Seattle is great - on Saturday night we went to a Jazz bar and drank Martinis, on Sunday we went to the opening of a quasi-hip hop club in trendy Capitol Hill... the sound is a lot more raw in Seattle than Vancouver which is great, the DJs experiment a lot more and the crowd is really chilled. Cabbed it down to a Breaks club which was hosting a DJ comp - this was really great, stuck around there till the early hours. Unlike in Canada you can smoke in clubs in the US, so this reminded me a lot of Sydney.
Did some shopping - much better in Seattle than Vancouver. Cheaper prices, massive malls and department stores - hey, it's America after all. Then arrived back in Vancouver on Monday night and back to the reality of several assignments, exams and presentations due over the next few weeks.
I have photos of Seattle & Whistler to post, but haven't had time yet to shrink them down to blogspot size, so I will get to that soon.
Email me people, I will reply eventually and I really like hearing from you even if I don't acknowledge that for a while.
Until next time (hopefully soon)
-Nick
posted by Unknown | 4:55 pm
1 Comments:
my visa came thru for canada in december.. whistler here i come baby!
post more
-andy
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