I just got back from a week in Seattle. The first time I went back I was sort of disappointed at how un-profound the experience was. I guess I hadn’t been away for long enough. This time I was less disappointed.
My neighborhood is the Pike/Pine corridor between downtown and Broadway. Downtown is stunning, and the corridor has a variety of restaurants, bars, and shops. Broadway is a hip freak-show. It wasn’t like any of this surprised me, but I’d forgotten the extent to which these things are true. This despite the fact that I’ve only been gone for nine months.
It struck me that it would be so easy to live there. I know the language, for one thing, but also prices are reasonable (for everything other than property, that is).
But it also felt cheap. The buildings are flimsy, and although the diversity is nice, there are so many people that are trying so desperately not to be normal that you have to wonder if they have anything else going for them. Seattle has no shortage of really androgynous people. I try to be open-minded, but this is something I find hard to take.
Traffic continues to be terrible, and, of course, no real progress on mass-transit has been made. The drivers were more aggressive than I remember them. Inevitably it seems that drivers of luxury vehicles are the worst offenders, but that’s true in Denmark as well.
I was also conscious of a little extra stress on my part due to the fact that Seattle — and any place on the West coast of the US for that matter — could at any minute suffer a devastating earthquake. There’s something really nice about living in a place where that’s not true — a place where you don’t have to think about securing book-cases to walls or having emergency supplies on hand.
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