seattle: good night, seattle, we love you

on saturday we drove from portland to seattle. although it's only around a two or three hour drive we had planned to go to multnomah falls and olympia for lunch so we knew we'd take a bit longer, plus it was raining so heavily on the drive that we had to take it a bit slow. still, we did stop at multnomah falls in the midst of some heavy rainfall and saw the very impressive waterfall.

we then had lunch in olympia - the capital of washington - as planned and made our way onto seattle where we arrived at the lovely amanda's place. the next day (sunday) we made our way over to fremont, a rather trendy suburb of seattle, as we'd been told that their flea market on a sunday was something of a treat. fremont flea market was a hive of activity - buzzing with adults, children and dogs. there was a plethora of different stalls and food carts. we had a great lunch consisting of sharing a huge naan bread with chicken tikka, lentil dahl, rice and mango chutney all blobbed on top! and i even had a little organic white chocolate from the chocolate stall for dessert. we also bought some postcards by a photographer whose prints we really liked - erryn rose (ErrynRose.com) - but unfortunately we couldn't afford to buy full sized prints and we were a bit concerned about transporting anything larger all the way home.

afterwards we went to washington university campus as we'd been told it was very pretty and we wanted to go to the burke museum which is based there. the museum gave us a brilliant overview of the washington area and its people.

up high on jam's wish list of things to do in seattle was the EMP museum, a 'music + sci-fi + pop culture' museum. the EMP building is impressive before you've even set foot inside with the free-flowing edges, shiny iridescent surface and monorail going through the middle - i certainly felt like i was entering into the future.

inside the museum we worked our way around the different exhibitions, from tales of seattle locals nirvana and hendrix, to the guitar gallery, fantasy and sci-fi exhibitions. we also spent plenty of time on the top floor in the 'sound lab' where we both had a go at mixing on decks, playing the drums and the electric guitar (well, jam played and i observed that one).

afterwards we went to the most amazing art gallery. it is called chihuly garden and glass, and it shows dale chihuly's glass work. it was so good, we were really glad we went. jamie has now decided he wants to have a go at glass blowing after seeing these pieces! i must admit it is rather inspiring; i'm rather tempted to try to find myself a lesson too.

as you may have spotted above, we also saw the iconic space needle.

in seattle we also had one of the best evenings out of our trip so far (thanks to jam and his prior research!) - we went to the pink door for dinner. the pink door has no signage outside and is only identifiable by its pink door. behind the door lies a treat! not only was the food really tasty (and drink - a yummy fresh pomegranate martini for me) but twice during dinner we had a trapeze artist performing above us. she was really very talented and it made for a very unique dining experience.