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We had arranged to meet Piaw at 12:15 next to a fountain on campus. We showed up exactly at 12:15, at which point Piaw accused us of being 15 minutes late. Glares were exchanged.
We had been planning to take a tour of Seattle's "Underground City", but it turned out that the tour times weren't going to work out--we had agreed to show up at the Seattle Design center at 3:00 to play volleyball or frisbee that day. Earlier that morning, I had called up the tour people, found out about the bad-timing problem. I had then flipped through the tour books, looking for other things to do. Seattle's usual tourist attractions were all downtown, but Piaw had said to hold off on those as his friend Deborah, who was more familiar with the downtown area, would be free on Saturday to show us around those areas. I came up with two ideas of places to go: The Capitol Hill area (with lots of old fancy houses) and Alki beach.
When we met up with Piaw, people liked the idea of Alki Beach. I was all set to walk there until Piaw realized which beach I was talking about. It turned out that I had gotten its location wrong--it wasn't three miles from campus, but more like seven. So much for walking there. Also, Piaw said that it was difficult to get there by bus. So instead we took the bus downtown to see one of the famous Seattle attractions: Pike Place Market.
We took the bus downtown. On Wednesday, we had come to the conclusion that Seattle must have a good bus system. We reached this conclusion because of the large numbers of people we saw waiting for buses. The bus system is indeed rather cool. For 85 cents we were able to go downtown and get a transfer good for coming back. Along the way, we crossed over this river that divides North Seattle, including the University District, from Downtown. It was a drawbridge, and we got stopped for a couple of minutes to let some dippy yachter go under. The bus was a diesel, but when it got downtown, it hooked up probes to some overhead wires and went electric. And it went underground. Basically, it changed from a diesel bus to an electric subway. The process probably took less than a minute.
We emerged from the underground bus stop into what seemed to be Seattle's downtown shopping district. There were a lot of shops I didn't pay much attention to--we were looking for a place to have breakfast.
Before we got to the Pike Place area, we found a hole-in-the-wall place called Alora's. They had pretty good food rather cheap. It was very friendly. The waiter-guy talked to us. There were regulars who were obviously very at home there--serving themselves, walking back into the kitchen to talk with the cook (named Alora, I believe). Our table was decorated with what looked like pictures of the waiter and Alora on vacation on the set of Once Upon A Time In China or some movie set in a similar time/place. Piaw was rather hungry and ate two lunches. I had my first Seattle latte' there. It was simple to order. I asked for a double latte', and the guy didn't ask me to spell out exactly what I meant.
After lunch, we reached the Market. This was like other water-front tourist areas, with lots of kitschy (sp?) shops and nicely decorated restaurants. It did have a genuine farmers market, though. Along with seafood stores. The only thing that marred the authentic air of these shops was that they all had these signs saying that they would ship things anywhere. I guess they did a lot of tourist business.
We took the bus back to the University district going through a scenic neighborhood, which turned out to be the Capitol Hill area I had read about in the guidebook. It looked like a nice neighborhood, though we went through it rather quickly.
Soon we were back at GeoWorks. They were about to have a meeting to decide which applicants for intern positions they wanted to hire. So we would have to wait until after the meeting for frisbee/volleyball/whatever.
By the time the meeting was over, it was getting dark. After all our waiting, we were only able to convince two people from the office to actually go out and play frisbee! The group headed up to Ravenna park and did some Disk in the Dusk. As it got dark, tossing the frisbees got dangerous, since one of the frisbees was mostly black. After a while, visibility got so bad that I walked away from my position to get to one under a light. This was taken as a signal that things were over and other people started walking in. It had been fun, but I had hoped for more.
We headed back to the office and scrounged up some Seattle GeoWorkers for dinner. After spending a lot of time trying to settle on where to eat, we hadn't even decided on a category. Even though I didn't like seafood, I suggested that we do seafood. My stated reason for this was that seafood would be one kind of food where Seattle would be better than Berkeley. But really, I figured that no-one in their right mind really likes seafood, and because of this most people only have one or two seafood places that they like, thus making for easier decision-making.
Soon we were on our way downtown (by bus again). We went into the first seafood place we saw, called Cutter's. It was expensive. I paid something like ten dollars for some shrimp yakisoba, plus more for some clam chowder. We weren't dressed very well, and they put us in the back room. But some people had things which were reportedly really good. (I didn't bother to remember what those things were, since they were seafood, which I don't really like.)
Afterwards, we found our way back to the bus stop. (This was kind of strange--I think the bus routes change at night. I don't think the buses go underground at night. But I'm really not sure I understand, and I don't think any of the natives I was with did either--I don't think they went downtown at night very often.)
We were soon delivered to the pool hall. I think at this point we lost all but one of the Seattle GeoWorkers. But Piaw and the rest of us played pool and ping-pong until the place closed at midnight. Andy Chiu, one of the Seattle co-ops, had left his state ID as a deposit on one of the pool tables and had left without picking it up. So we knew we had a chore for the next morning.
Before going to bed, Joon went to the store to get some more food for himself and some sourpatch kids for the rest of us. They were so tasty.