Seattle

I have spent the past three days on a short weekend trip to Seattle. This was my first time to the city and I managed to pack in a few key tourist attractions and activities while I was here. I arrived early afternoon on Friday and took the Link light rail from the airport to the downtown Seattle Westlake stop. The trip lasted 40 minutes and only cost $3.00 one way, which was a great bargain.

I stayed at the newly renovated Hotel Theodore (1531 7th Avenue), which was centrally located to public transport, shops and attractions. It's a really cute hotel with nice, clean rooms and offers its guests daily complementary happy hour drinks. Check out their website to see if there are any deals before booking.

On Friday after checking in I walked down Pine Street past all the stores and holiday decorations to the waterfront to check out the Pike Place Market. It's a massive space and maze of different food and product stalls as well as little shops (kind of a bigger version of Melbourne's Queen Victoria Market). I stopped in to the French bakery Le Panier for a croissant and some macarons, and after wandering around for a bit I grabbed dinner from Pike Place Chowder, who are famous for their different seafood chowders (I had the New England clam chowder, which was tasty). That evening I headed out to the Neptune theater to see comedian Hari Kondabolu, which was the impetus for this trip.

On Saturday I took the short journey on the monorail to the Seattle Center, home to the Space Needle and other tourist attractions. My first stop though was a walk down Broad Street to the Olympic Sculpture Park, which contains large scale sculptures and native plants within its nine acres along the waterfront. There were diverse and interesting pieces throughout, and it is a calming place to wander around (and appears to be a local exercise spot).

Next I walked back to the Seattle Center and went to the amazing Chihuly Garden and Glass (read a detailed post about my visit here). Then I headed to the Museum of Pop Culture (MoPOP) to check out a few of their exhibitions. There were lots of different little music exhibits, including ones on Jimmy Hendrix, David Bowie, and a history of guitars.

One thing I was really excited to see was The Jim Henson Exhibition: Imagination Unlimited. As someone who grew up on Sesame Street and The Muppets it was great to learn more about Jim Henson's career and get to see some of the puppets up close and personal (I nearly gasped when I saw Kermit). The exhibition also has storyboards, costumes and film clips from Henson's various projects over the years. It is definitely work checking out and has been extended until 25 February 2018.

After my day at the Seattle Center I took the monorail back and then walked a couple blocks up to the Pacific Place Center to finally see the movie Thor: Ragnarok. I do not follow the Marvel comics at all but am a huge fan of New Zealand director Taika Waititi (What We Do In The Shadows is one of my favorite movies) so wanted to check out the film. Not really knowing much about the history of Thor made the first part a bit slow, but once Thor (Chris Hemsworth) was captured on the planet Sakaar and forced to be a gladiator under the Grandmaster (brilliantly played by Jeff Goldblum) things picked up. Thor gets reunited in the ring with his buddy Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), and also makes a new friend in Korg (Taika Waititi hilariously voicing the character as a Maori bouncer from Auckland). Eventually they all escape and head back to the planet Asgard to try and rescue the citizens from Thor's sister Hela (Cate Blanchett) who has taken over as ruler. I enjoyed the Australian and New Zealand references Taika put into the movie such as mentions of the film The Castle, the Holden Commodore car, and painting spaceships in the colors of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags. For a big budget action picture Taika did manage to get a lot of his humor and style into the film, and it's great that it has been so successful.

This morning I wandered around a bit at Pacific Place Center before heading back to the airport for my afternoon flight to San Francisco. Overall my trip to Seattle was a good taster and gave me an opportunity to orient myself with the city. I was very lucky with the weather in that although it was cold I didn't experience any rain. Hopefully I'll get an opportunity to return again someday to explore more of Seattle.

Chihuly Garden And Glass

Chihuly Garden and Glass is a long-term exhibition of artist Dale Chihuly's work located in the Seattle Center. It contains a comprehensive collection of his works throughout his career spread across eight galleries, a glasshouse and lush outside garden.

As you enter the exhibition the first room is the Glass Forest which contains a series of neon glass tubes.

Next are the works in the Northwest Room, which take their inspiration from the First Nations people of the Northwest, particularly the form of baskets.

The Sealife Room is full of intricate glass work inspired by different sea animals and plants, including a giant sealife glass sculpture in the middle of the room.

The Persian Ceiling is a room where you can sit and look up at all the works assembled together within the ceiling, which are almost like a 3D stained glass window.

Mille Fiori is a giant floor length garden of glass sculptures, with the little intricate details revealed as you walk around the piece.

Ikebana & Float Boat contain many different types of glass sculptures both within and alongside the boats.

The series of Chandeliers are quite detailed glass sculptures in different colors that located both within an indoor gallery and along a walkway in the museum.

The Macchia Forest is the final gallery room, which is full of beautiful hand blown glass bowls.

The main highlight of the museum is the Glasshouse and the large 100 foot long glass sculpture hanging along the length of its ceiling. It is simply breathtaking to look at as you also get views of the outdoor gardens, sky and even the Space Needle.

The extensive outdoor Garden contains glass sculptures interwoven with plants and trees. It's a very unique way to display the art within a natural context.

The museum also has a theater that shows a series of short films about Chihuly's different exhibitions around the world throughout his career and how they came together. In addition, every hour there is a glass blowing demonstration out in the courtyard where you can watch and learn how a piece is made. For the one I watched they were making a vase and unfortunately it broke off and shattered towards the end of the process (but that's the life of glass blowing - it doesn't always work out).

If you are ever in Seattle you have to check out Chihuly Garden and Glass as it is a must do activity for tourists and locals.

An Evening With Hari Kondabolu

I have become a big fan of comedian Hari Kondabolu through his podcast Politically Re-Active with W. Kamau Bell. Since I missed Hari’s show in Oakland by a week I decided to fly up to Seattle to finally see him perform live at the Neptune theater. Hari did two sold out shows tonight (I went to the 10pm show), which were taped for a Netflix special. After being welcomed by comedy legend Bobcat Goldthwait (who was directing the special), Liz Miele came out and did a short stand-up set to warm up the crowd. Her material touched on topics around family, friends, and health and wellbeing.

Hari came out to massive cheers from the sold out crowd. He started out with some inter-city rivalry jokes about Portland, which played well with the Seattle crowd. Hari covered a lot of material during his set, from the political with Trump and the unleashing of overt racism and sexism that has resulted, to the personal with having people pronounce his name correctly, his relationship and interactions with his parents, and love for mangoes (#MangoTalk). Hari is really good at exploring issues in an intelligent way from different angles, which was the case for his observations on gentrification, healthcare and airport security (which I could really relate to having been on five different flights over the past two weeks). While I was hoping for all new material, I did recognise some bits from his previous comedy album releases and YouTube clips, which was understandable considering he was taping a special.

As these shows were being taped there were points throughout the set where Hari would pause to re-state something for edits. At end they had to do a few extra crowd shots for the opening and closing credits, so while those were set up Bobcat and Hari told a couple of funny off the record stories to the crowd. I'm glad I was finally able to see Hari do stand-up in person, and hopefully he will make a return visit to Australia in 2018. If you haven't had a chance to check it out, I would strongly urge you to watch Hari's fantastic documentary The Problem with Apu.

Here's a clip of one of my favorite bits from the evening about Hari's own healthcare plan: