Seattle some more

Continuing with the Seattle trip:

We had a coffee at the original Starbucks at Pike Market. The logo for the original Starbucks was a bit raunchier than the current Starbucks logo, as you can see in the picture (in the current one, she is a bit more covered up). At this Starbucks, there was the nicest order taker ever... she was this Japanese girl that looked like she was totally and completely ecstatic to be serving you. At that point, we observed that the people in Seattle were REALLY nice (the cars stop for pedestrians). At the salmon place the server was a girl, probably college aged. My friend Hana is notorious for asking deep penetrating questions about everything, including salmon (what's the difference between your great salmon and your really great salmon?). Hana was in rare form with this waitress. But she smilingly answered all his questions and gave a lot of awesome insights. One of the dangers of this niceness was I thought all of the women who talked to me really liked me.

The next day, we came to a red light while walking to the Underground tour, and were tempted to just cross, Madison style. We paused because the whole city seemed to be so courteous and law abiding and nice, and us crossing at a red light may create a butterfly effect (i.e. a butterfly flaps his wings in Tokyo and causes a hurricane in the US) and all of Seattle will go to crap. We decided to cross anyway and risk it... (dot dot dot)

The Underground Tour was something that Karen had mentioned in a comment earlier... The story is the city decided to raise all the streets to manage the flooding issues, but couldn't agree with the business on the road to do it. So they raised the roads and kept the sidewalks where they were, resulting in a 8-35 ft drops from the road to the sidewalk. Later they built sidewalks to fill the gap, resulting in an underground open space (as seen in this picture). This is just one of the weird, screwed up things that I've learned about this city.

It was after this tour that the butterfly effect started kicking in...

Salmon update:

My salmon streak was broken at lunch yesterday, as we had a spicy chicken pizza near the Seattle center (it was excellent, similar to Dewey's back in Cinci). But it was restarted at dinner, as I had a British Columbia Atlantic Salmon stuffed with shrimp and dungeness crab (British Columbia Atlantic??? More to come...). Unfortunately, it was broken again today at lunch as we had really good Dim Sum in Vancouver. Tomorrow, sushi buffet! All the raw fish you can eat...