Tossed Salads and Scrambled Eggs, pt 1

So I am now officially a college graduate. I have one diploma in my bedroom and the other one in the mail. As a consequence, my mom bought me a vacation as my graduation gift. She's always known that I've wanted to go up to the Northwest and check out the place, mostly because I have always had this dream of working at Nintendo, but that was before I realized that game testers could have very boring early-pipeline jobs. But even recently I had joked with my cousin about sending our "resumes" to NOA. You know, top scores, fastest race times, achieved multiple endings, found 100% of all items, etc. But this vacation was also just as much for my cousin Tony. When he graduated from ITT a couple years ago, we had no money. I was over in Berkeley, so I didn't get a chance to celebrate with him. So this trip has been a few years in the making. 

We flew up on Thursday and came back that Sunday afternoon. Not a whole lot of time to get stuff done, but we set out to go do everything we had planned and thensome. 

Day 1:

We land at about 5 in the afternoon. We call our shuttle service which we had already made a reservation for. And then comes up this limo. Yeah, we got to ride in a limo. We were convinced that all the bottled water and bags of food were actually charged a la carte, so we didn't touch them at all, but I'm pretty sure that was only like the second time in my life I was in a limo. I remember the one year I went to prom I went with my friend Jeanne in her Jeep. I wonder where she is now...

We got to our hotel, the Edgewater, right on the piers. There's actually this famous picture (or so I've heard) of the Beatles fishing out of their hotel balcony at that hotel. And the hotel rooms do have balconies overlooking the piers with nothing underneath. But fishing's not allowed anymore. Our room didn't have a balcony. Our room didn't even face the water. Oh well. It was a pretty fancy hotel still. They charged 5 bucks an hour for wifi! The bathroom had this fancy shower that only had 2/3 of a door and a wash basin. Not a sink, a wash basin! Needless to say, we assumed that even the shampoo bottles and miniature soaps would get charged onto our room account, so we brought everything we needed from home. 

Once we were checked in, we wanted to go to the Space Needle and eat at that revolving restaurant that rotates so you can look at all the city.  But they were maxed out on walk-ins so we had to make a reservation for lunch the next day. 

The area around the Space Needle has a bunch of stuff that I will go into detail later. There was the Experience Music Project, the Science Fiction Museum, the Ride The Ducks Tour, and the Science Center. We had looked up stuff on the Science center ahead of time and we saw that there was gonna be a laser show set to Tool music that night at 9. We still had time, so Tony and I went to a nearby sports grill. For the NBA semifinals going on, the place was pretty empty. Tony had a steak. I had a small pepperoni pizza and a cup of chili which I must say was really good but had TOO MUCH meat. I didn't even think that was possible. We finished our meal and saw that the sun was still out. 

Then we looked at our phones. It was 8:45. And the sun was out. Living in the southern contiguous region of the US my entire life, this took some getting used to. So that "Nine in the Afternoon" song actually DOES make sense! And I just thought it was about a nuke exploding. 

So we found the laser show. And it was effing awesome. It really made me miss the days of the Flandrau. And now I heard they closed the Flandrau to the public cause of budgets and stuff. WAH! 

So then Tony and I got lost trying to walk back to our hotel. It was only a mile away, but we kept turning left when we should've turned right. Last time I leave Tony with the map. Was it cool that we got to explore the city? Yeah, but I just wish we hadn't done it in a foreign city in the middle of the night! I was genuinely freaked out. Though we did find the Pike Place Market on our excursion, which was cool. But our 1 mile downhill walk (Seattle is VERY hilly. It reminded me of Berkeley) became a 3 mile uphill, sideways, then uphill again walk. 

Day 2 in the next post.