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We had agreed to meet Piaw at 11:30 this morning. He had canceled his classes so he could be with us for the day. We were late getting up.
The motel proprietor stopped me on the way out of the room. The maid had reported that there were four people sleeping in the room. He'd spotted us "sneaking someone in through the balcony." (I think he was delusional.) We were busted. My brilliant plan to sneak underage Paul into the room had backfired.
But we weren't really busted--I told the proprietor that Paul had planned to sleep at a friend's place, but had fallen asleep in our room. He probably didn't believe me, but he just wanted us to pay for the extra person. He didn't check our IDs. Whew!
We spent a few minutes(!) waiting for a light to cross a street to get from the motel to the Geoworks Seattle Design Center to drop off Andy's ID.
When we met up with Piaw we were exactly fifteen minutes late, which I figured made up for his false accusation the day before. Whilst supping at Cutter's the night before, Andy had mentioned a cheaper, more casual seafood place he knew in the area. I forget what it was called. It sounded kind of like Spenger's (a Berkeley seafood place), but that wasn't its name. Anyhow, it was on pier 56. Or pier 59. Well, it had branches on both of those piers, but I forget which one we went to. The one next to the aquarium, behind Pike Place Market.
This branch was kind of a fast-food seafood place. I got a burger and some chowder. The chowder wasn't that great. Apparently the other branches of this place are a bit spiffier, presumably with better food. I mean, the branch we were at was basically a fish-and-chips place.
Our next stop was to be the Seattle Underground Tour. It turns out that Piaw's friend Deborah was going to be in Reno for the weekend, and thus would not be available for showing us around Downtown, which left us free to see it without her. I was wearing my billed cap to protect me from the damp of the underground passages. This was the official Geoworks golf cap. A golf cap is a lot like a baseball cap, except that it has a panel behind the front part of the skull-cap portion to make your head look like that of Frankenstein's monster. I had tried wearing this cap during a GeoPicnic, during which it had basically fallen apart. Before the trip, I had specifically sewn up this cap so I would have some protective headgear to wear during the underground tour.
So I was kind of miffed when the hat's brim blocked my upward vision so that I clonked my head on the low doorway of the streetcar that was to bring us to the tour area. I stumbled to an empty seat, sat down, and waited for my vision to clear. I turned the cap 45 degrees to the right so that I could see where I was going.
The tour started out with a little talk. This talk mostly consisted of trashing Californians and Tacoma-ites. I guess I should have expected it. San Francisco tour guides do the same thing. It never seemed funny when they did it, either. I like to think I'm as mean-spirited as the next guy, but I could never get into those city rivalries.
The tour itself was kind of interesting. It had a lot of rubble. Some of the rubble had history behind it.
We decided to go for coffee at the Elliott Bay Book Company to decide what to do that evening. This was a bookstore with a nice cafe' in the basement. We drank coffee, ate pastries, and decided to go see a show that night. The problem was that between the five of us, we had basically no musical taste in common. I figured our best bet would be to go to a blues club Jimmy had been to on his trip to Seattle--there had been a good rockin' blues band playing (Freddy James and the (something) 88's Rockin' Blues Band).
We spent some remaining time talking. Then we went upstairs. I don't really understand what happened next. Someone wanted to look for a particular book. And we ended up in that book store for over an hour. Normally this would be fine with me. But that morning I had woken up a fair amount earlier than my fellow travelers. I'd spent the time reading, but had been reluctant to turn on a bright light for fear of waking the others. In retrospect, I probably should have read in the bathroom. (I was reading Tom Peters' Thriving On Chaos, a management book.) Suffice it to say that my eyes were basically shot for reading for the day.
At the bookstore, I tried reading for half an hour (The Hacker Crackdown (?) by Bruce Sterling--seemed interesting), but my eyes hurt too much after that to continue. I couldn't understand why we were sticking around. Hanging out in a bookstore and not talking to one another seemed like something that we could do at anytime--alone. I was getting bored. I moped around for half an hour, wondering why we were still in the bookstore. I watched everyone else in the group, trying to read their body language.
Piaw was speed-reading, trying to figure out if the book he was skimming was worth buying and reading slowly. He noticed me watching him, was irritated, and determinedly continued reading, not raising his eyes, but hunching his shoulders until I wandered off.
Joon was stumbling from area to area. For the first half-hour, he had gone amongst the technology books and read us choicer stupid quotes. But he had become bored, and was flipping pages listlessly.
I couldn't tell how much Paul was into reading. He wasn't looking at the book, just sitting with his eyes closed. But the book was a topology text, and he was probably just thinking about what he'd read.
I wandered up a couple of staircases and found Jimmy in the philosophy section. He's been on kind of a philosophy kick since he read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (by Pirsig). When he saw me he said "Are we going?" I figured that between him, me, and Joon, we had three people who definitely wanted to go. When Jimmy and I walked up to the rest of the group, Paul got up to his feet. "Are we going?" he asked. Piaw was the only one still reading. "Are you ready?" I asked him. He looked up. Soon we were headed out to the checkout counter and thence out the door. Piaw had evidently found his review of Innumeracy favorable, and bought the book.
On the way out, we heard some sort of author reading going on down in the cafe. We didn't stick around to listen, though.
On our way to the restaurant/night-club, we stopped off at a shop that sold nothing but rubber stamps, stamp pads, and inkers. They had a lot of stamps. I only have one stamp, but they didn't have it. They had a lot of Disney stamps, but no Love and Rockets--go figure.
Eventually we made it to the restaurant/club which was called the New Orleans something or other. The food was good. I had a very good Cajun Chicken something. The band sucked, though. This was not Freddie James. This was some guy and his something Radio Orchestra. They were kind of big-band jazzy. Nice if you like jazz, maybe. I don't like jazz. None of us really seemed to like the band--everyone at the table was either reading books or the newspaper (except me, because my eyes hurt too much). We snuck out between sets.
Took the bus back to the U. district. There we parted ways with Piaw. We figured we were too tired to play pool all night. Walking back towards the hotel along University Avenue, we spotted a theater playing Hong Kong movies. Cool! Part of the reason I had chosen this week for the outing is that the U.C. theater in Berkeley was taking a one-week break from showing H.K. movies that week. So here we'd be able to get a chance to see our H.K. movie of the week.
We were there too late to catch the regular feature (Hard Boiled). It was just around 11, and at 11 they were showing their late(!) movie--in this case the rated X Erotic Ghost Story. When we went inside, we found out that since this was a Friday night, the late movie would be showing later than usual--11:30. I don't think this town really understands what a "late" movie is. Anyhow, we ran over to the pool hall, played for 20 minutes and came back.
The theater was interesting. I don't remember exactly where it was--it was a little towards the University from University Ave, maybe on 50th. Anyhow, the waiting area had a couch, a table, maybe some chairs. I think they served coffee. When we got inside the theater itself, it seemed about the same size as the waiting area, holding maybe 50 people?
Erotic Ghost Story may be a good H.K. movie to see with people who are insensitive clods: no-one laughed when there was a mistake in the subtitles. I'm not sure that any people were paying any attention to the subtitles.
After the movie, we headed back to the room. As we were getting ready for bed, we were watching TV. The Marx Brothers' A Night At The Opera was on. It was on TBS, and as such was colorized and had far too many commercials. Or rather it had a few commercials which were repeated far too many times. But it was sooo funny. We stayed up until 3am watching it.
So we felt pretty awful when we woke up on Saturday.