This Is A Lake - A travel blog

Last day in Seattle, last day of holidays! Today I took my sweet time getting out of the hotel and walked over to Pioneer Square, the original enclave around which the city of Seattle would grow. There’s not much to look at, outside of a Native American totem pole and a microscopic but pleasant waterfall garden around the corner.  Since I wasn’t getting much traction there, I took a Link back up and went to the last big chunk of Seattle that I had left: the Seattle Center, an area with museums and galleries built originally for the 1962 World Fair. This is, of course, where the Space Needle is! I didn’t go up, but it was great to look at it up close after seeing it in TV shows and movies for so long. I started by visiting the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has a small and free exhibition space for visitors. Microsoft is of course based here in Washington state, hence the foundation having its HQ in Seattle. I was very interested in the exhibits explaining the foundation’s goa

First day in Seattle! True to its reputation, it was raining as soon as I left the hotel. I’d read in both of my guides that Portland and Seattle people think umbrellas are a sign of weakness, even though it rains here all the time, and sure enough, I didn’t see many umbrellas out there (I always travel with my tiny ultra-light umbrella from the future I got in Japan). Some people wear beanies, or hoods, and some people... just get wet, which seems suboptimal to me, but I’m not gonna tell you how to live your life! Because of the rain, I started by visiting the Seattle Art Museum, which occupies a large modern building downtown. It has four floors, but really the galleries occupy only two. I was rather underwhelmed by the collection here, I have to say; it feels like they do a little bit of everything but they don’t have a deep enough representation of any one theme, time or style. They have a series of tiny rooms for Egyptian, Graeco-Roman, and Islamic art, some European paintings and