End of Summer 2009 - Seattle (Day 3)

We slept in this morning... well, if you can consider 8:30am sleeping in. John came and met us at the hotel about an hour later and we were on our way to downtown Seattle to explore the Seattle Aquarium. Our goal was to go to IHOP for breakfast before we set out to explore, but when we arrived, it was jam packed with a zillion people. I guess Sunday mornings at the IHOP in Bellevue is the happening place to be. Second choice... Burger King.

Driving through downtown Seattle reminded me a bit of driving through the streets of San Francisco. Steep, one way streets, chaotic with people crossing in every direction... stressful and not my favorite thing in the world. I gladly pulled into the first pay parking lot along the waterfront that we could find and we walked the rest of the way. Along the waterfront, we passed a homeless man who was begging for change that smelled so rank and disgusting it just about made me gag. It reminded me of that man who joined us on the subway in Paris that day and made me grateful that I can shower every day. Even John said "Phew - he's ripe!" Yes, "ripe" was a gentle way of putting it.

The Seattle Aquarium is really a cool aquarium. I took way too many pictures and Brandon had a blast with all the touching pools and different kinds of fish to see. My favorite part was the rotating jellyfish tank with multi-colored bulbs that faded one color into the next as the jellies were rotating around. I could have watched that tank forever. There was also an octopus tank with a Pacific Giant octupus in it. It was hiding under a rock, but they had a feeding show at 1:00pm that brought it out for everyone to see. I was fascinated with how it changed from a greyish pink color to a dark salmonish red color as it prepared to attack. There were so many people gathered around the tank to watch this spectacle that it was difficult to capture any decent pictures and I was irritated with the general discourteous nature of some people who are either ignorantly oblivious of their surroundings or worse, purposely entitled as they block the view of everyone around them on their pursuit of their own agendas. Apparently they are way more important than everyone else and we should all just take a step backward to allow them to stand in front of us and hog any view we might have had to begin with. Jerks. I had to bite my tongue as it never does any good to say anything anyway. And the parents, who let their children run rampant without any discipline at all... the children pushing others out of the way so they can have the best view without any care for those around them... and the parents who either ignore this behavior or condone it because, like the jerks I mentioned above, they are obviously better than everyone else and we should gladly step aside just because of their very presence. Ugh - can you tell it was a problem for me today? I just hate these kinds of people, mainly because I'm not one of them, and gladly would never be. Still, it does strike a nerve.

Anyway, enough complaining... back to the aquarium. Some very cool tank exhibits and really, one of the best aquariums I've seen before. My favorite is still the Shark Reef in Vegas. After the aquarium, we drove to the Museum of Flight, over by Boeing Field. This place was really cool too... reminded me a lot of the Aerospace Museum at Hill AFB. Lots of original style old planes, bomber planes, military planes, helicopters, commercial planes, etc. There was even a cool room with spacecraft... lunar mission craft, lunar rover, space shuttle replica, flight simulators, etc. We had a lot of fun and spent a lot of time here. There was even a place where we could make our own paper airplanes of all sizes and fashions and we spent quite a while making amazing planes and flying them around. Brandon, of course, is the paper airplane master and the lady who was running this part of the exhibit was so impressed with his paper airplane making that she asked him to show her how to make one so she could pass on his knowledge. That was pretty cool.

After we played around at the air musuem we ate dinner at Olive Garden and then went back to John's apartment so they could play more HALO before we said goodbye to John and the first part of our trip. I think they had a nice visit together, and I'm glad I was able to bring Brandon with me on this trip so they could have this time.

Tomorrow - JENNI!!! I'm so excited to go hang out with Jenni I can barely stand it. Stay tuned...

Brandon here:

So today was so fun! First we woke up at eight because the beds were so comfortable... then we went to burger king for breakfast. Then we went to the coolest aquarium ever. It was cool because the aquarium had sea mammals AND birds. What aquarium has those?!?!?! Then we went to the Museum of Flight where I was filled to the maximum learning capacity of airplane knowledge. I also went in a few airplane exhibits to learn... I also tried the space moon landing simulator which I sucked at. I also tried the shuttle runway landing simulator which I sucked worse at. I didn't want to go into the flight simulator rides though because they would have made me sick. They had one though that you could fly an F-22. Then we went to Johns house and played Halo 1 and 2 and then we said our goodbye's. See you tomorrow!!! :)

PS - Brandon said his thought process isn't working very well tonight and that's why he didn't write as much as he usually does. I think he's a bit sad because when I read him my portion of the blog that said we weren't seeing John tomorrow... he was really surprised and said I hadn't told him that we weren't seeing him any more on this trip. After that, he wasn't all that interested in writing tonight. Sad... maybe I'll have to find a way to include a little more time with John before we head to Portland.

The jellies - without colorful illumination.


A surprising and very cool Chihuly Exhibit... :)




The most dangerous jelly of all!!!













This reminds me of those creatures at the end of the movie "The Abyss"...



I think this picture has, I don't know, a creepy factor to it... just me?