The train station sign from behind in Vancouver
Alice in the que for the bus, note the mustache on the guy in front of her
It took around 2 hours to get to the border and then since they only had one guy on checking everyones eligibility to enter the wonderful country that is America it took another 2 hours to get in ! also i had to pay $6 for a form and there was no public toilet (to get into Canada is free and there are 5 toilets available for use !) The bus driver was saying that he starts his shift at around 9am in Vancouver and after Seattle continues down to Portland Oregon, he normally arrives there at around midnight and then he has to get up at 8am to travel back. He does this for 6 days and then gets 3 days off ! not fun/safe in my opinion.
We arrived at our hostel after walking around 10 blocks the wrong way...oops ! it was $175 (£124 in the current exchange rate...back in the day this would of been £90) for 3 nights which includes a free breakfast everyday and a free dinner on Tuesday night. We were in a 6 bed dorm, each bed had a fan and little lamp and a curtain which was pretty cool.
We headed out pretty much straight away for some food and drinks. We went to Fados which is an irish pub just down the road as Debi had told me we could get Magners there !
Me and a magners !! i only had one because they were $8 :(
The waitress thought we were the coolest thing since sliced bread and sat at our table and chatted to us telling us places we should go etc...she even hugged us on the way out..only in America. She was pretty cool, we went back there and hungout with her again but il get to that...
We had to go home and sort out a rent payment as our cheques had been written wrong so that put a bit of a damper on the evening but we played some scrabble which was pretty fun.
The next morning we got up bright and early and headed down for some free breakfast
After breakfast we headed out and about to take in the city before embarking on an underground tour. This is the public market which is a little famous...
Alice has some sort of magnet to tea shops... I got a cup of 'crumpet shop blend' for $1.75 with unlimited refils so naturally i had around 4 and had to pee a lot all day ! This place was a crumpet shop and when we walked in the guy said "are you familiar with crumpets ?" it was probably the best sentence i could of heard at 8:30am. Also it reinstated to me that sorry Canada but Americans are just waaaaaaay mroe freindly
This sign was funny
Seattle still has a lot of old buildings which makes the city prettier than Vancouver
Chief Seattle, he is why Seattle is called Seattle !
We then went on the underground tour, the original city was build on mud flat and thus had a lot of problems. At one point there was a big fire which started in a glue factory and continued to destroy the whole town. Afterwards they had a meeting and the mayor etc wanted to blast down the near by cliff and thus raise the level of the city so that it wouldn't be so soggy anymore. but that would take 10 years and the people were having none of it so they started building right away on the mud flat. the government went ahead with their plan and thus the street level was raised and the original city became underground...get it ?
alice and a room with a view
our hostel
cool car wash sign
as you can see we had excellent weather the whole time we were there :)
making our way to the space needle
perfect night in
Then we headed out and up the hill in search of some cool pubs, and found one...i don't seem to have and good pictures from it but we drunk Hams and it was fun !
so that was day one, on day 2 we went to the zoo which was very nice and a lot of the enclosures were cool. Plus they had a night time section in a dark room with armadillos etc, cool beans !
Mandatory alice on bridge with mitten under arm piture
sun bear
big nest
jealous
On the way home from the zoo we went to freemont which is a pretty cool area in seattle. We had some delicious burgers then went to coldstones and had some ice cream and then went to the tea shop and alice had some tea...so that was pretty much the best lunch ever ! after all that we did a wee bit shopping, i bought a new jumper which i just found out is made from 100% shetland wool and is ralph lauren ! it was only $10 ! i also bought some blue sailor type ribbon with the intention of getting a bit girly and wearing it in my hair now that im growing it !
nice building
some cool vintage things in the shop where i got my jumper
the freemont troll under the bridge, thats a real car !!
the center of the universe
The hostel have a night out on wednesdays so we figured we would go along, only thing is since its for happy hour it started at 5pm, bottles of miller were $1 so we went along and had 4 and then ran down to the pub quiz at the irish pub i mentioned before which started at 6:30. We got there just in the nick of time and the waitress who thought we were the bomb found us a table eventhough it was pretty busy. It was happy hour there too so we got some beers in and settled down for the quiz. First round...NFL !? we had no clue but some how managed to get 1 out of 5. The rest of the quiz was slightly american centric and the guy spoke fast so it was hard to understand his accent but we clawed in back in the great british cities round scoring 5 out of 5 ! alice had to down a pint of beer and although she didnt win it was a pretty good effort. then a guy who was impressed by our scottishness bought us both a $10 tequila ! then the waitress bought us some strongbows ! it was all a bit hazy from that point forth...at which point it was around 8pm ahahaha, we both think we were there til close which was around 1am....the waitress gave me her email so perhaps il ask her !!
the market
hungover scrabble
and that concludes my trip ! this blog entry was pretty long so im expecting a few comments in return !!
