January 27, 2010
Curiosities in Washington
The best time I ever had in Washington was the last one. That’s the one where I finally got to see why everyone I went to school with loved Seattle so much. I never made it to the city, not because I wasn’t interested, but because I like so much of Washington that I never felt I needed to. Spokane, Moses Lake, Bremerton, and anything that had a forest connected to it, these all appealed to me, and it doesn’t hurt that I have a lot of family there. But I never set foot in Seattle before. Maybe I was afraid that I’d secretly like it so much that I would have to consider moving there. All this was very well-founded, because I found this excellent hotel site here and decided to go for a few days, just to check it out myself.
I didn’t tell any of my friends that I was going, just so they wouldn’t try to be tour guides and show me all the cool places. Every city has cool places, and if that’s all you see, you’re likely to move just about anywhere. I wanted to run into the boring things, the every day things, and see if there was any magic in that. Of course, there’s magic everywhere, and it turns out this city has a much greater share of it than any other I’d been to. I went to the Market, and avoided the guys throwing fish, because that seemed too obvious, and instead found Ye Olde Curiosity Shop. It seemed funky and unassuming in a lot of ways, and I was caught up in the joke items, because there was a very smart sense of humor behind them.
What really took me in, however, were the shrunken heads. It’s really fairly alarming to find yourself in Seattle on a Saturday morning, expecting to be surrounded by comfortable people selling comfortable things to make you more comfortable, along with hundreds of umbrellas. But heads are not what I thought I would see. This shop has been here for over a hundred years, and the original owner was this anthropologist guy. It’s unusual enough to make me consider a move, and if the terminal hipness gets to me, I can always go back to Tenzing Momo and talk to my apothecary.
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Filed by Herbert Jones at 1:48 pm under Travel
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