seattle

just got back from an excellent trip to seattle. stayed with my friend sarah. seattle is a cool city. its a bit similar to vancouver, and also reminded me of both wellington and auckland for various reasons - its full of independant cafes and shops, has a port, nice parks and nearby islands and beach.

we spent a lot of time chilling out in (the excellent) cafes around the suburb sarah lives. i spent an afternoon wandering around the beach, and walked back past the port etc - beautiful sunny day. we went to the sci fi museum, which was probably the highlight of the trip. its the only museum dedicated to sci fi in america. didnt realise quite how nerdy i was until we were there - i especially liked the mechanical suit worn by sigourney weaver in aliens, and also manuscripts and ink cartridges etc used by one of my favourite authors neal stephenson. but there was tons of cool stuff. also checked out the university campus - its large (35,000 students) and really beautiful. washington uni has the highest per capita coffee consumption of american uni's, and washington state is apparently the highest educated!

so yeah, great trip. back to work for next few days, hopefully i'll be snowboarding early next week when i get next days off...