Because my first flight was delayed, the layover in Minneapolis/St. Paul was reduced to a brisk jog though the concourse followed by immediate boarding. I arrived in Seattle tired, hungry, and with a headache. It had been approximately eleven hours since food or caffeine, so after meeting Andy and Sarah, my first Seattle activity was fast food.
We headed back to their place and I got the nickel tour. It’s a tiny cozy house, but fine for just two people.
After brief recuperation, we went out to meet some of Andy’s friends and then out to a bar called “Hattie’s Hat.” Nice place, and not too busy, but the waiter was kind of a dick. Amanda and Sarah met up with us a bit later as well. It was a slightly awkward reunion, given that our party had three degrees of separation between them and Andy’s friends, but it was fun anyhow.
Interesting Seattle fact: I soon learned that unlike Lincoln, Seattle doesn’t really have a centralized location for most bars. Instead, they’re dispersed throughout every little neighborhood.
On Friday, we woke up and moseyed out to the airport again to pick up Phil. SeaTac has this nifty “cell phone waiting area,” which is basically a parking lot near the pickup area (but with spaces too small to actually get out of the vehicle, it seems). You can park there and wait for someone arriving to call you, then drive through and pick them up with perfect timing.
We grabbed lunch at “Araya’s,” a sort of Asian vegetarian place. It was excellent, and it passed the vital test for vegetarian meals: afterwards I didn’t feel like I had really missed the meat.
In the afternoon we rented some canoes from the university rec center and went out on Lake Union. Well, at first we rented a rowboat so that we could all fit in a single vessel, but that turned out to be a pain to maneuver. We sheepishly returned the rowboat in exchange for two canoes—an excellent trade in my opinion.
We were pretty tired after that, so we just watched TV at Andy’s until evening rolled around. I can’t go without mentioning this, because it’s how we happened upon the classic film Death Hunt. For being a standard old adventure movie, it was surprisingly good! And some of the lines provided excellent fodder for conversation the rest of the weekend. I would recommend Death Hunt to anyone who’s in the mood for a good movie about a death hunt.
Since it was St. Patrick’s Day, we made the obligatory trip to an Irish pub for the traditional SPD activities:
Nonetheless, it was fun. I was especially amused by the fact that the bar’s name was “Murphy’s,” since two of the four Irish people I know happen to bear that name as well (shout out to Team Ireland!). They had an Irish band playing traditional-_sounding_ stuff (hell if I know what’s authentic), and we met Andy’s friend Erin, whom I certainly wouldn’t mind meeting again. Eventually we decided that we’d had our daily recommended allowance of Eire for the year and left. Wound up at a semi-crappy sports bar down the street, which was far less crowded and had drinks I could afford. And that was it for Friday!
Come back soon for Part 3, in which I shall divulge the secret technique Phil and I used to share a hide-a-bed without touching each other.
