I came back last week from spending two weeks in Seattle, Washington. This was my first time visiting a major US city.

The space needle:

Walking around in downtown Seattle felt strange, in a way. I guess because I only know US cities from movies and TV series, I felt as if I was walking around on a movie set. From the tall buildings to the yellow cabs to the perfectly American alley ways, where looking into one made me expect either batman or spiderman kicking some ass, or CSI to investigate a body behind a dumpster. It was uncanny, and I had (literally, I guess) never seen anything like it in real life.

I took a tour to one of the national parks, to visit mount Rainier. I went by myself and ended up in a tourbus with 20 other people from all over the world. I’m really quite happy I did that because I really wanted to see some of nature out there. The mountain was beautiful, and even though it was weird being going alone, and doing the afternoon hike by myself, I still thoroughly enjoyed it.

A picture from the trip:

I of course visited pike place market, but this is not really a big deal for Europeans I think, since it’s basically like a normal market place for us, except made permanent.

Although I explored the city some, did some shopping, went to the Cheesecake Factory and sat around watching Americans go about their daily lives, the second week I spend solely focused on TI things.

Overall what struck me about Seattle/the US was that the air conditioning was brutal, inside the hotel you had to wear long jeans and a hoodie to be comfortable, whereas outside it was boiling hot. How is that comfortable? And how do people not get ill from severe temperature changes like this? Also, the toilets were very small height-wise, like, you would only find toilets that small in kindergarten buildings over here. Exception was Key Arena. Thankfully normal height toilets over there. Finally, the prius. Priusses (?) galore in Seattle. A lot of cabs are priusses, and just in general people are driving around in priusses everywhere. Imma go ahead and note this as a positive thing because from what I’ve heard the Prius is very low impact on our environment and tends to be one of the better choices if one is considerate of preserving out planet.

Anyway, had fun. 10/10 would visit again.

For more pictures regarding this trip (and also more Dota 2 related pictures), check out this album.