Two days in Seattle

B and I are coming to the end of a very short trip in Seattle (B had a conference). Our United flight up yesterday morning was too early in the morning and cramped as usual, had friendly staff and got in twenty minutes early. In spite of the myriad problems with Priceline — I hope never to shop through Priceline again — we successfully picked up a car from Budget at the airport without a long wait. We went to the Tacoma Museum of Glass, had lunch at Pike Place Market, explored the Seattle Art Museum, and enjoyed a serviceable dinner at Cedars Restaurant. The hotel — the Holiday Inn Express, another Priceline find — is friendly and cheap, and worth it only because we rented a car. Pros: free wifi and printing. Cons: the bathroom smelled like cigarettes when we arrived, and there was no hot water until this morning.

Today we explored UW. We worked a few hours over coffee at Solstice, stopped in at the University bookstore, and lunched at Wayward Vegan, which was fine but oversalted (the tempeh reubens are better in Eugene). We had intermittent sunbreaks all day, but a few hours of sun in the afternoon was enough to see the center of campus and the church-like library. Dinner was excellent at Village Sushi: we shared all dishes, starting (after salad and miso) with the six-piece Chef's Choice sashimi (tuna, salmon, escolar, shiromi, snapper, and scallops with roe), and then moving on to tuna lightly seared in sesame and dressed in a citrus-soy dressing and served over greens, and finished the dinner first with unagi (eel) and then a very tasty uni (urchin). Both in the afternoon and then after dinner, we went to Chaco Canyon, my new favorite cafe. Chaco is all organic and very hippie: drinks consisting of vegetables passed through a blender, bowls of tofu and quinoa, and raw vegan raspberry tart.

Tomorrow if the weather holds we'll go to the zoo, maybe back to Chaco for lunch, and then to the airport. If the weather is bad, probably Experience Music Project? Then I hop on a plane to Eugene to visit my parents and B hops on a plane to Salt Lake City to go through the archives at Bringham Young University.

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Update 12 June 2010:

I finally posted pictures from the Seattle trip on Picasa. There are a few from outside the Tacoma Glass Museum, Pike Place Market, the Seattle Art Museum, and the UW campus. And there are a lot from the Seattle Zoo — the weather held. You can view the slide show here, or click on it to go to the Picasa page: