Seattle

July 26, 2010

Lindsay and I started slowing down in Seattle. We'd been moving from place to place for several weeks straight, and our pace seemed to catch up with us.

First, we had a night full of good stories, spending time with Gooch and Ashley. They rolled out the red carpet for us in the form of salmon, Brussel sprouts, sweet corn, and copious dessert. We stayed up late trading our stories from traveling for their stories of adventures in remodeling.

After that, we slowed down some. We stayed in Seattle with Lindsay's friend Adrianna, in a house full of doctors in their residency. They were very friendly, and worked very hard at their new jobs, seemingly around the clock, while we slept in.

While we were not sleeping, we did lots of things we enjoyed. Adrianna and Heather (Lindsay's friends from study abroad)

were fine company while eating Cuban sandwiches at the beach.

We visited Bastyr University, went past Microsoft's expansive campus in Redmond.

We saw spawning salmon jumping upstream. We drank cups of coffee. Mark got a haircut. We spent time in the downtown library.

We visited the Boeing factory, which was impressive by several measures. Boeing owns the biggest building in the world, which they use to hold assembly lines of Boeing 767, 787, and 777 planes side by side while being built. The company also makes a case for (1) being a major factor our world getting smaller – moving people and goods around the world's airports so quickly, cheaply, and (2) having one of the most impressive supply chains in the world. I'm willing to concede both points quickly. The tour was well worth the time.

Seattle's downtown library was a highlight of the town for us. Very good, very new architecture can just be, simply, fun. Seattle recently spent money rebuilding or rejuvenating all of it's libraries simultaneously. The flagship is the new downtown library, architected by Rem Koolhaas. From the outside the it looks like a shifting stack of glass. From the inside it's amazing.

The library stacks are laid out in an ascending spiral. You can walk most of the stacks without touching stairs or an elevator – sort of like an adventure of knowledge, or sort of like learning is for those who seem to enjoy it. The fourth floor is a meeting area, and it's painted entirely fire-engine red, every square inch of it. The walls of the fourth floor seem to say, “Why not?”. The middle of the library is eight stories of empty space, with an eight story structural wall both helps hold up the spiral, and that stands on giant squares of carpet with grassland patterns on them. From the bottom, you feel like you're in an indoor forest of books. “Why not?”.

I spent time reading some of Benjamin Franklin's letters, while Lindsay walked up the spiral of bookcases from bottom to top. It was a perfect way to spend an afternoon.