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> Visitor's view of Seattle, what the locals take for granted
Snow_Fox
post May 5 2008, 03:28 AM
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Ok chummers I just got back from Seattle. Interesting run but I was suprised by a few things about the city that you really don't hear about, maybe the tourist board wants it kept quiet, maybe the locals who hang here just take it for granted but if I share this, maybe I can help you avoid some of the surprises i hit.

Other visitors can chime in too as can the locals.

OOC: This is all based on my recent vaccation to Seattle. Thank you very much for those who gave input. If admin will tell me where, I'll be happy to share some of my experiences with the people here who kindly made their knowlwedge available for me. References to a map are to the map of seattle down town from 1st ed and the original Seattle SB
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Adarael
post May 5 2008, 03:39 AM
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Funny you should mention this, SF. The Stranger just ran an article the very same subject.

I'm curious what all surprised you...
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Snow_Fox
post May 5 2008, 03:43 AM
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OK first and formost- Seattle has freaking hills.
Let me say that again. Seattle has HILLS. "Queen Anne" "Capital" etc are not just names. they seem like freaking mountains. They don't need street cars as much as they need llamas. OK maybe a little over stating but the down town runs on an 18% grade. I'm told it is an improvment from a 40% grade in the late 19th century.

Lots of freaking steps and slopes. If you're going to commit a crime there, don't plan to run uphill. Just walking some of those one of my chummers had to have his adrenaline pump kick in and I'll admit to having to rest on occassion.

Rain, ok, Seattle's famous for rain but it is not really that bad. The heavy rain is kept off by the olympia mountains to the west but it seems pretty damn common for it to cloud over and have showers but nothing too bad. Certainly not as bad as Tokyo or Philadelphia or New York.
That having been said in a week there I saw 1 day where at some point it did NOT look like it was going to rain. But umbrella's are a sure sign of a visitor. As one native told me "What I'm gonna carry an umberlla every day?"
"So you just give up?"
"pretty much."

rain coats are also a sign of someone from outside, but not as much as the umbrella. most locals seem to wear servicable, resistant jackets with hoods. very few people where leather jackets, certainly not when compared to the eastern cities I'm use to. I guess if you don't know if it's going to rain today, most poeple don't want to risk it.

Oddly- most Seattle women I saw seemed to have an aversion to socks. sure people 'working' might but in general lots of bare feet in shoes or boots.

More comments to follow soon.
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Cain
post May 5 2008, 04:00 AM
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Heh, hills.

A ways back, I was over visiting friends back East, and they were complaining about their hills. My comment was: "Where I come from, we don't call those hills, we call them speed bumps." When they came to Seattle and saw Queen Anne, their comment was: "We wouldn't call those hills, we'd call those cliff faces." (IMG:style_emoticons/default/cool.gif)

(Yeah, I'm a little homesick. Sue me. You can't live somewhere for over 20 years without getting somewhat attached. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/frown.gif) )
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Cantankerous
post May 5 2008, 05:16 AM
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In and out and in again, from Seattle to the Smoke, most recently, for nearly a year and a half and now back home in soggy Seattle.

Ohhh, have I got to disagree about the rain. People say that London is soggy. Hey, London is misty. Seattle is SOGGY. I've lived here and there and here and there and there and here and all over the bloody place and Seattle is easily the soggiest city I've ever lived in. York is the most sullen, New York and Detroit tie as the most randomly violent, London is the weirdest, Vienna the most laid back and Seattle is the SOGGIEST! Of course the women here don't like socks. Socks get soggi...er, than bare feet. I'd run around as Shoeless Joe Big Troll if I could get away with it. Normally I make sure anything I get that are intended to get near my feet are as water resistant as a ducks hiney.

But, without a doubt, I'll second the cliff faces. People in Vienna and London and York are flat landers. Chi-Town and New York are nearly so. San Francisco has hills, but WE have a junior version of El Capitan in our downtown.


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Snow_Fox
post May 6 2008, 01:36 AM
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food- ok Seattle is famous for salmon right? well yes but it's not the only food and probably not the most common. it's famous because it is the big industry but seafood places serve just as much in crabs and oysters, so much so that it is pretty common for restaurants to have preprinted warnings on them of the dangers of eating undercooked/raw seafood.

I've had oysters and steak tartar on the east coast and never seen that warning, never mind it being so common it's printed in place.

pizza- do they even know what this is in Seattle? In New york or Philly you cannot walk more than three blocks without seeing a pizza place for quick food. I honestly can't remember seeing a pizza place in seattle, but I did see coffee shops. lots of coffee shops. drek loads of coffee shops. on one street i saw the same brand of shop- right accross the street from each other ,like some bad sim.
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Fortune
post May 6 2008, 01:51 AM
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QUOTE (Snow_Fox @ May 6 2008, 11:36 AM) *
... but I did see coffee shops. lots of coffee shops. drek loads of coffee shops. on one street i saw the same brand of shop- right accross the street from each other ,like some bad sim.



That's a feature, not a bug! (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)
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Cain
post May 6 2008, 02:35 AM
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Pagliacci's Pizza is widely considered to be the best in the area. I honestly don't know how it compares to New York or Chicago pizza, but I think it's pretty good.
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bclements
post May 6 2008, 02:39 AM
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My ex-wife's uncle lived over in Capital Hill, and we spent a few weeks with him at at times (and it was mostly sunny for the times I was there). He didn't own a car, and worked as a sous-chef in a place downtown that got it's windows busted during the WTO riots; a good 20 block up and 8 block over walk.

NYC blocks are one thing, but when you're walking up, and I mean up a hill for about 15 of those blocks...it's a good workout. And it's not a quick workout.
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Cantankerous
post May 6 2008, 11:31 AM
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QUOTE (Snow_Fox @ May 6 2008, 03:36 AM) *
food- ok Seattle is famous for salmon right? well yes but it's not the only food and probably not the most common. it's famous because it is the big industry but seafood places serve just as much in crabs and oysters, so much so that it is pretty common for restaurants to have preprinted warnings on them of the dangers of eating undercooked/raw seafood.

I've had oysters and steak tartar on the east coast and never seen that wwarning, never mnid it being so common it's printed in place.

pizza- do they even know what this is in Seattle? In New york or Philly you cannot walk more than three blocks without seeing a pizza place for quick food. I honestly can't remember seeing a pizza place in seattle, but I did see coffee shops. lots of coffee shops. drek loads of coffee shops. on one street i saw the same brand of shop- right accross the street from each other ,like some bad sim.


Had a Pizza in this place called Tutta Bella (Seattlites is that right? It sounds right in my memory.) that was as good as any Pizza I had in Chi-Town. Of course without regard to their advertising, it was definitely an American Pizza, and not even vaguely Italian in it's make up, but hey, living here in Vienna now, just up the road about eight hours from real northern Italy, almost every Pizza Parlor here makes their Pizza the American way too, so.... (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)


Isshia
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Method
post May 6 2008, 10:28 PM
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QUOTE (Cantankerous @ May 6 2008, 03:31 AM) *
Had a Pizza in this place called Tutta Bella...


On Stoneway just off 45th in Wallingford. Good place.

Edit: apparently there's one downtown as well. I didn't know that...
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krakjen
post May 6 2008, 11:12 PM
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Damn, I'd like to go to the US only to see Seattle.

And as I was thinking of some other way to nicely visualize the city, I thought:
A GTA-like Shadowrun game would be pretty nice...
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Snow_Fox
post May 7 2008, 04:05 AM
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Sports. Seattle has professional teams, we know that but I tried to get a feel for what type of town it is, like how Philly's afootball town and New York's a baseball town. Well the answer is neither. Sure the sports have their proponents, if they didn't they couldn't supportthe teams BUT Seattlites seem more of the 'DIY' type. Outdoors work, walking, bicycling-on those damn hills geez they're nuts, and boats.

I don't know why this never gets mentioned but this is a boating town. There is one registered boat for every 10 Seattlites. Lake Washington, Elliot Bay, linked by Lake Union and a line of canals. The town actually has an official start of a boating season the whole town celebrates! Heck. I grew up on the coast. My parents actually belonged to a yacht club and there was never any region wide start of the season. Not just big boats for bigh corpers. little boats, speed boats, canoes, house boats, docks on high pilings with boats 'parking' underneath. Yeah, I know, the proper word is 'moored' but the way these things were stacked up, they were parked like cars at the mall.

Then you get professional boats-cargo ships, warships from the relocated Bremmerton navy yard, liners, ferries and beaucoup fishing boats. The cannals connecting Elliot bay to lake union seem large enough to permitt professional fishing boats to slip into lake Union to shelter...from storms.

so between boats and bikes and feet, Seattle is it's own sport.

and did I mention the damn hills? Trying to move quickly in land from the harbor to the public library , Union and 4th I think, by 3rd ave I had to rest against a lamp post for a minute.
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Cantankerous
post May 7 2008, 01:10 PM
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Even I caught the boating bug here. Yep, a Runner, a troll, over sized and over wared enough to make sinking seem reasonable in the Great Salt Lake, much less Lake Washington and on more than a few occasions I found myself knocking around in my chummers Otter for FUN.

Did I ever mention before that I wasn't born this way? When I was still a fair haired young man of the less than my present, ahhh, size, I was an avid hiker and mountain cyclist. In college I used to spend every weekend biking up the paths of Ranier...course that was almost in a different life



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nezumi
post May 7 2008, 01:57 PM
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How tall is Seattle? How urban? That always struck me, comparing DeeCee to NYC (or even Balmer), DeeCee is a short city. There's gotta be a law here or something. NYC I'm lucky I didn't fall into an open manhole craning my neck up at the sky scrapers (you'd think there's a MINIMUM building height law there!) And in both of those cities you feel like you're really in a city, whereas when I went to Pittsburg, even downtown felt downright quant in comparison.
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Hatspur
post May 7 2008, 03:23 PM
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Ah yes, I love the east coast/midwest "My god, you mean there's variation in geography?" response to anywhere in the west. I can't really talk having grown up in the Shadows of Minneapolis, but I've been out here for a while and you get used to seeing giant shards of Earth sprout from the ground.


Surprisingly, myself and many other people I know thought Seattle was this cute little fishing village in Puget sound before we actually bothered looking at census figures. The silliest thing is that some people from Seattle don't usually consider Tacoma or Everett part of Seattle. To me those are suburbs just like Bellevue and Redmond. It's all in the greater Seattle area or at least it seems to be from an outsiders perspective.
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tete
post May 7 2008, 04:37 PM
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Pioneer Square, Downtown Core, Belltown are tall
Queen Ann, Capital Hill and Ballard are all growing to aprox 5 story buildings for new construction.
everywhere else is usually 2-3 stories

Public Transportation sucks if you are going out of seattle proper (though they now have a train to the airport at leased)
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Snow_Fox
post May 8 2008, 02:25 AM
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Took the bus up to the U Dub, there were multiple lines and they actually seemd to work a heck of a lot better getting around to the Fremont Troll and back to down town. I did n't see any of the agressive pan handler that populate downtown in the university district I guess no money with poor college sutdents. and outside the school grounds proper were ltos of little places to get food. A surprising number of asian places and can I saw a vietnamese sandwhich shop in which I had the only disgusting meal of my entire trip.

There's a nice musuem just inside the U dub gates, natual history and lots on the local peoples. Several wooden totem poles are there, inside and out with a nice sotry that before the awakening several were returned to the original owners form whom they had been stolen in the 19th century. In friendship the tribes given back their treasures provided replacements mostly made in the same traditional way. one really creepy on thrtough was a modern interpretation of the sotry of ah unter who married a bear and when he left her, her cubs ate him. The traditional pole is great. the new interpretation is deeply disturbing, like the artist was tapping into somethnig more than just the folk tale.

There is also a giant wooden women that is supposed to have been built to show that you are owed money byt the people you set it up near. Great you come out of your long house and find the Millers have aimed a statue at you because you forgot to return the lawn mower. Interestly it is called a dzoo-noo-qua, which most runners will recognize as the name given a troll with HMHVV but which seems to have been the Tsimminan word for the sasquatch. Therem ust be some interesting prejudice behind those names being assigned around the awakening time.

Seattle takes pride in being a city of small,single family houses on it's own plot of land but as costs go up and land runs out they are seeing more town houses go up and some feel this is taking away the city's charm. The build up area is only about 2 to 2 1/2 miles long. From the market in the middle it's only about a mile in each direction that's built up. By comparrison, Manhattan, with 20 blocks to the mile is over 6 miles long and heavily built up the whole way.

One thing that I never saw and what doesn't show on satilite pics is the fact that the high way along Alaska way is elevated. called the viaduct. it is on two teirs. the upper level going one way, the lower level going the other. the lower level is 20 feet off of the ground! At the turn of the century there was talk of replacing it with a tunnel or something but ultimately there was no consensus on the solution and the rush of refugees from the NAN put it on the back burner, they've just kept reinforcing it after each quake-Seattle use to get a quake every 35 years or so, but the mass eruptions in the ring of fire seem to have fixed that.
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nezumi
post May 8 2008, 02:48 PM
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QUOTE (Snow_Fox @ May 7 2008, 09:25 PM) *
The build up area is only about 2 to 2 1/2 miles long. From the market in the middle it's only about a mile in each direction that's built up. By comparrison, Manhattan, with 20 blocks to the mile is over 6 miles long and heavily built up the whole way.


Wow... Tiny! They're so cute.

QUOTE
One thing that I never saw and what doesn't show on satilite pics is the fact that the high way along Alaska way is elevated. called the viaduct. it is on two teirs. the upper level going one way, the lower level going the other. the lower level is 20 feet off of the ground!


Neat. So I guess they have off-ramps to connect to it. Which level is going which direction? (I mean, is the upper level the westbound or eastbound? Or is it northbound?)
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fool
post May 8 2008, 09:45 PM
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I have kind of the next-door neighbors perspective on Seattle.
I live in P-Town, and generally, we think of Seattle as uptight yuppies who are ruining Oregon by selling their houses at outrageous prices and moving to our neighborhoods, driving up the costs of everything (californians are even worse). Seattlites generally think of us as assbackward hippies who can't focus on anything longer than a bong hit. Seattle is the land of traffic jams and Starbucks. Portland has coffee roasters who deliver to mom and pop coffee shops by bike. Seattle is professional sports teams, Portland is hiking, biking and kayaking.
Sorry, It's just a Ptown thang.
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Entropian
post May 8 2008, 10:23 PM
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QUOTE (nezumi @ May 8 2008, 06:48 AM) *
Neat. So I guess they have off-ramps to connect to it. Which level is going which direction? (I mean, is the upper level the westbound or eastbound? Or is it northbound?)



The viaduct runs north-south along the waterfront. I think the top is northbound and the bottom is southbound.
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Cain
post May 8 2008, 11:09 PM
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QUOTE
Interestly it is called a dzoo-noo-qua, which most runners will recognize as the name given a troll with HMHVV but which seems to have been the Tsimminan word for the sasquatch. Therem ust be some interesting prejudice behind those names being assigned around the awakening time.

The Dzoo-noo-qua was not a sasquatch. She was actually a bloodthirsty, vampiric monster used to frighten children from staying out in the woods too late. There's many legends about her in local myths; she's actually quite famous. It was almost a rite of passage for several of the legendary heroes to have defeated her in some way; whereupon she would give the hero a gift of some sort, enabling them to take on greater challenges.

(Side note: I worked at the Sea Monster House back in the 80's. I still remember some of the stories, although I'm understandably a bit rusty.)
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Entropian
post May 9 2008, 04:22 AM
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Sea Monster House? Is that in Seattle?
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Cain
post May 9 2008, 05:18 AM
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QUOTE (Entropian @ May 8 2008, 08:22 PM) *
Sea Monster House? Is that in Seattle?

The Sea Monster House is an Kwakiutl longhouse (or, at least, most of one) that's on display at the Burke Museum. The display shows all kinds of fascinating information on the tribes of the early 1900's, and they have regular storytimes when you could hear the legends of the local tribes. (Or, they used to; it's been a few years since I was there.) That's where I first heard the legends of Dzoo-noo-qua. Anyway, if you want some info on the local myths of Shadowrun's Salish tribes, that would be a good place to start.
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Grinder
post May 9 2008, 08:58 AM
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QUOTE (fool @ May 8 2008, 11:45 PM) *
Seattle is professional sports teams, Portland is hiking, biking and kayaking.


Don't you have the Trailblazers?

QUOTE
Sorry, It's just a Ptown thang.


We have the same with Hamburg vs. Bremen here. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)
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