Seattle, Vancouver, and a House near Portland

Summer 2007

My quaint little hotel room in Seattle. I stayed at the Moore Hotel, which is a 100 year old building sporting attractive old arcitecture (and nice radiators), that is immaculately kept by the staff. I enjoyed my stay at the Moore, and heartily recommend it to anyone needing Seattle accomodations. It's something like $65 a night, and is right in the heart of town. There are some yowling hoodlums on the night-time street below your thin-paned window, but hey -- what do you want?









My first morning in Seattle, I was picked up to go to the Telephone Museum in a very small car. That's Smj driving, and Dpeschel in the backseat. "Smj" and "Dpeschel" are the usernames of people on a public access UNIX system I hang out on called "SDF". I met up with four people in total (including these two), all in Seattle and all of them internet aquaintances from that same system. They kept calling me "Barnacle" (my old username), and I got a little weirded out.









A poster in the telephone museum.









A piece of aesthetic equipment -- possibly a teletype machine. Smj and Dpeschel were into the functionality of everything, knowing what everything was called, and what it did. I mostly just walked around and took pictures of objects that looked nice to me. Sometimes either Smj, Dpeschel, or a museum staff member would explain something to me.









ET phone home. Many of the pieces could communicate with other pieces in the museum. It was terribly neat stuff, really, to make all of these ancient phones and switchboards click and sound by pressing some 50 year old buttons on another ancient thing a few feet away. The museum volunteers put a lot of effort into mechanical upkeep.









Smj at play. The Telephone Museum was set up like the "Children's Discovery Museum": instead of carpeted walkways and sterile lit-up display cases, the experience consisted of tables full of well-kept historical machines to play with. Everything was in pretty much working order, too.

Telephone museum staff consisted of volunteers; former repairmen and such from the 50s and 60s. I engaged one in a conversation about wages, but I regretted it a little bit when the answer started to drag out in a "...back in my day..." way. But my question of "What did you guys earn?"
was answered: about $5/h in today's money. I had assumed that these were better-paid guys, because the stuff they repaired is really, really complicated: 10-foot automated switchboards of moving parts and the like. "And then it all moved to solid state!".









Hmm.









A wall of technological objects.









Some objects recognizable as actual telephones, of which there weren't very many.









I have no idea what this is/does. I just liked the way it looked.









Ditto for this one. Well, I see that it says "AUDIO SPECTRUM ANALYZER" at the top, so I guess that solves that.









Dpeschel at play.









Smj deleting me during dessert. At the offical user meeting, we ate Ethiopian (someone else has pictures of that -- Rdhatt, I believe), and then went to a cafe for drinks and sweets. I had a rootbeer float.









A lovely alleyway dumpster in Seattle. I really can't ever get enough of these types of photos.









A bin of crustaceans (crayfish or lobsters) at Pike's Peak Market in Seattle. The fish mongers were a little annoyed that I was snapping photos of their wares rather than buying them up. "Can't eat the pictures!", one said. I can't blame them for being miffed. The only purpose of tourists is that they often secrete some of their money. But if they just stand around and take pictures, then they should really be placed under arrest.









A salmon, possibly?









Two very nice halibut. Halibut can be big: something like 8 feet long and 600 lbs. I've heard of them breaking the legs of fishermen by thrashing around after being hauled aboard a boat deck. These two were not such formidable halibut.









I visited the Seattle Aquarium, which is supposed to be pretty good. I guess it is; I don't go to many aquariums. I feel a little guilty posting my aquarium-tank pics (but not, oddly, my pics of grafitti art): here we have these aesthetic creatures, arranged tastefully in a tank for you, and I just wander up and take a picture of them. One might expect a lot of fish-oriented pictures to be generated by a visit to Seattle.









Some fish.









An octopus.









Yes.









I was excited by this one when I took it, but now I see the scratches on the glass tank, and am less excited.









Davek, another user from the SDF UNIX system. I told him to make that face, either before or after an excellent meal of Szechuan food, recommended by Dpeschel the Tourguide. Dpeschel has lived in Seattle for something like 15 years, and knows all the good stuff.









Four (possibly five) boats converging into the picture window in Seattle. Taken from an observation deck in a building called the "Columbia Tower". Smj advised me to view the cityscape from here, rather than at the famous "Space Needle". Better view, cheaper, and less crowded, by my understanding.

Now, the pictures are of Vancouver. I was given a working-over at Canadian customs, making me feel like your basic criminal scum. I held up the bus being interrogated twice, and having my dirty underwear rooted through by a prim little gloved woman who pronounced "Maryland" like "Mary Land". Damn Canadians. I think the special attention was because 1) I told them I was "unemployed" (rather than "a student" -- same difference), 2) I loudly offered my help in dealing with some Japanese girls who weren't understanding the questions and whom I had previously helped with their declaration cards, and 3) I just naturally look like riff-raff. What can you do?

Lurvely squids in Vancouver's Chinatown. I don't know why I keep wanting to see the Chinatown in whatever city I happen to be visiting -- they're all exactly the same.









A man in Vancouver who clearly didn't mind having his picture taken. I'm wont to think that his choice of loitering spots had a lot to do with the orange wall matching his orange hat.









I always take pictures of grafitti lettering on worn and old textures -- these shots over time have turned out to be some of my favorites. It's cheating, obviously, because I didn't draw the grafitti. But I'll take a picture of anything if I like the looks of it, including paintings in an art gallery. I was doing this in Seattle, but was told to stop. I took a pic of a fascinating large painting of a superrealistic cartoon moose, standing on a pink background. I'm going to make postcards out of it, and sell them. Hah.









Etc.









Urban ruin at its best: grafitti, delapidated brick, and barbed wire.









A street musician in Vancouver, who was also happy to allow photographs. For this shot, I told him to be Neil Young. So, this is what we get from that. Walking around the city, I saw him again some hours later and about a mile away. I felt some kind of cosmopolitan "street cred" as I waved hello to him: "I know that guy, man". He actually did tell me to "keep in touch", and told me where he usually hangs out.









A generic postcard cityscape -- imagine "SEATTLE" or "VANCOUVER" in big red block letters in the lefthand corner of the sky. In fact, I have no idea whether this is a view of Seattle or of Vancouver. I guess it really doesn't matter. Maybe someone recognizes the tower with the big "S" on it. Anyway, I
did go up into an observation tower in Vancouver. Turns out the tower is in Vancouver, and is Vancouver's tallest building! We so often come close to greatness without recognizing it; the story of modernity.

I didn't do too much in that city, having stayed only for two nights and one full day: I wandered through Chinatown like a schmuck and ate a disgusting meal of cold duck and squid (tentacles included). I went to the art museum (which had a terribly uninteresting contemporary collection), looked around the famed "Marijuana District" (300-400 West Hastings Street), which consisted of two stores selling "Legalize It" t-shirts, walked up to this here observation deck, and then cut through a "shops 'n' eats" area called "Gastown" (of which I sort of failed to see the point, exactly), where I was accosted by a toothless Australian who tried to get me to buy him a bus ticket. I'm sure this would have evolved into a more complicated confidence scam. He was so persistent that I asked him to stop harrassig me. When he wouldn't, I stopped, took him gently by the shoulders, gently spun him around, and gently pushed him on his way. "This is fucking bullshit!" he yelled as he walked away.

Then, I wound up back on East Hastings, where I lived, and where I got my pocket picked by a prostitute who came sidling up and put her arm around me. I'm 100% that was what happened, when I looked back on it. I used my remaining cash to order an unforgivably terrible pizza, and watched Canadian cable television in my tiny hotel room. The next day, I got the hell out of Vancouver.









Trains, from the same observation deck. They reminded me of a Legoland Play Set.









Colorful shipping dereks (same basic play-dough color scheme as the trains), also from that same Vancouver observatory. Vancouver and Seattle are similar from the air (water, buildings, mountains).









A (probably) homeless girl near my hotel who allowed me to take her picture. I gave her some money -- I'm not entirely exploitive and terrible. Just a little bit. My hotel was surrounded by derelicts of various natures: mostly prostitutes and homeless, I think. Maybe a drug dealer or two. They quite literally make up the bulk of the pedestrian traffic on that section of East Hastings Street, especially from 5pm - 9am.

A Word To The Wise: AVOID THE BUDGET INN PATRICIA HOTEL. It's not a terrible hotel (clean, good staff, smells ok), but it's location mandates staying somewhere else. I talked with the staff a little about it, and they said that it's a constant struggle with the area to maintain a livable environment. Unfortunately, I believe it to be a losing battle. The cabie who picked me up told me a horror story of some poor girl who, like me, had found the Patricia on the web searching for cheap lodging, and reserved a room sight-unseen.

He picked her up, crying, a day or so after she'd arrived. She told him that she hadn't left her hotel room at all because she was too frightened. Now, this was probably a little bit of an over-reaction (of course, I probably shouldn't assume my sense of saftety extends to non-male, non-6'3", non-300lb humans): these aren't violent derelicts, but only derelicts who are after your money. And, indeed, my wallet was stolen by one of them (not this girl). Losing my wallet and contracting the worst case of Poison Ivy (Poison Oak, actually -- see below) in my life in Oregon contributed to the overal rating of this trip being "below average". Vacations are ususally below average.

Think about that one for a while.









An old decrepite building face from (you guessed it) Vancouver. From my photos of it, someone might assertain that Vancouver is a bit of a Detroit-esque hellhole. Not so -- it's one of the most aesthetic, cleanest, saftest, and most "cultured" cities in North America (that's what I keep hearing, anyway). Its just that I was in, quite literally and by several accounts, the worst area of town, and I tend to take pictures of the aforementioned urban ruin.

Now, I get on a bus, breeze through a friendly American customs ("USA! USA!"), drive to Seattle, and then grab a last-minute connection to a Portland-bound train (someone had the same problem crossing into the USA that I had crossing into Canada, and held up the whole bus).









A soothing twilight shot of the friend I stayed with in Oregon. His name is Peter, and I've known him since we were 13 and 11. Wow, is that possible? I think so; I remember taking him to my French class in my first year of Junior High. Anyway, he's married now, lives in Oregon, and has two children: a boy and a girl, named Reyne and Haile, 2 and 4 years old, all respetively.









Family bath time. Well, really just Peter soaking the Poison Oak off of him, and the rest of the household watching. See, what happened was that Peter
and I took about 2 litres of "Jack Daniels" up to a state park in Oregon, and I got drunker than I've been since I was 19. I wound up trying to shortcut from one section of the trail to another, and stumbling and falling into a patch of Poison Oak, about which we were warned by signage, along with rattlesnakes (seriously). I literally couldn't move, and was struggling and rolling around in it for probably half an hour. Finally, I threw up all over myself, and the similarly (but not quite as badly) drunk Peter took off my pants for comedic purposes.

A hiker passing by would have seen a huge pantless man, covered in his own vomit, lying beside the trail in a patch of Poison Oak. I got it so bad that it probably warranted medical attention: eyes swollen shut, fever, sapped of all energy, not to mention the itching and oozing blisters. Peter had it pretty bad too, but not as bad as me; it was (and still is) on every part of my body except my feet, palms, and the top of my head. My feet are swollen up like little hooves.

There was no shortness of breath, though, so it's only a matter of waiting out my confused body's insane and desperate immune response (I
still have it so thick that I can't bend my legs all the way). I scratch as I type this, and play with my variously and cyclically oozing and drying leg-pustules (I've been taking frequent showers). I cut my trip short because of my condition; I had originally planned to fly next to the San Francisco Bay Area to visit other friends, but instead flew directly home from Portland to recuperate. I'm glad I did; that stuff is viscious. I basically spent the Portland-area segment of my trip scratching, sleeping, and drinking apple juice.









Peter's son, Reyne. I'm not sure what he's eating there, but now that I look at it and think back I believe it was a piece of cut-up plumb. Reyne is in his "terrible twos", and mostly says "I want this" while pointing at things, follows Haile around copying her, and fights with nearby Haile about the things he feels he's entitled to. He's a bright little kid, who understands a great deal of what you say to him.









Me. This was taken by Haile, and I think it's a good composition. If you put a camera in her hands, you basically have to pry it back out again an hour later. My camera was full of Haile's blurry photos of the walls of her home and her cat, but this one of me against a red background made the cut. The only photos in which I look halfway decent are those in which I'm making a bizarre face of some kind. As Peter likes to say, "I think Jung would have something to say about this".