Day 246 - Love, Seattle

Happy Valentines' Day all!

This was our last morning with our friend V. Before delivering us to our hotel, she drove us down to the arboreatum, one of my favourite haunts when we lived in Seattle.

Spring comes a little earlier here than on the East Coast. In sheltered areas near buildings daffodils and crocuses are already starting to bloom. Daffodils are my absolute favourite flower, and the first of the season are my favourite daffodils, so my day was already made by 8:30AM.

The arboreatum contains plants for all seasons, including a winter garden. The winter garden is so named because it is primarily occupied by plants which present 'winter interest', such as colourful bark, evergreen leaves, interesting branches, or winter blooms. My favourite of these are the yellow hazel. They have one of the loveliest smells of any plant in the garden.

After the arboretum, our friend dropped us at the College Inn where we waited and fretted for a key until it was time to assist a class lecture. I left my cell number and our packs at the hotel, and crossed my fingers that we would have a key in time.

Class went swimmingly - The new first years are good bunch, and it was great to see our scenic design professor again. After class, the three of us joined up with the costume design professor for lunch. It was really great to visit with them as fellow designers rather than as students.

We had just enough time when we finished eating to race to the College Inn to FINALLY retrieve the keys and then rush to the bus to catch the ferry to Bremerton.

We made the bus with time to spare, and got our ferry tickets with no hassle. Cz promptly fell asleep. I ended up playing cards with a high school dropout (he's in the process of getting his GED now) kid with black and red hair for most of the route. He knew all kinds of card games including one that's 'fun to play in jail'. I thought it best not to ask. In between playing cards with GED boy, I spent time looking out the windows, and even spotted a harbor seal!

In Bremerton, it was a simple matter to catch another set of buses to the housing complex where Cz's dad is staying. He met us in his nice, 1br apartment with bags of food and news that some friends would be coming over soon. Unfortunately, both Cz and I have rather spectacular colds, so wound up napping until the guests arrived. We managed to be sociable for the little party, and really had a great time.

On the return trip, the lights of Seattle glittered across the harbor. I wasn't able to get a good picture from the ferry, but once we were on solid ground we snapped this shot. Check out the building near the right side of the picture. You can just make out the Space Needle on the far left.

Love from Seattle indeed.

Day 245 - Home

When we lived in Seattle, we spent very little time in our apartment. Home was the studio and our respective shops more than anywhere else, so today we sat in on Studio class (the main class for UW grads, held in where else, but in The Studio, it's to the right of the ticket office). It hasn't changed. There are a few more shelves, and there may be a new coat of paint, but there's still the coffee shakes, the completely unproduceable ideas, and the futile attempt to make sensible discussion on 3hours of sleep. I've missed that.

After class, we went to lunch with the two students left from our generation (they were first years our second year) and a group of current first years. It was comforting to feel a part of design graduate student life again; to be a part of a world with which we were so familiar.

After lunch we stopped briefly to see the major renovations being done on the theatre in which Cz did his thesis show, and then walked up to the main theatre building to visit the costume shop. Before I knew it, the afternoon had flown by, and it was too late to catch the ferry out to Bremerton to visit Cz's dad. Luckily our cell phones are back on, so Cz and I quickly called and shuffled all our commitments around in order to go out tomorrow instead.

Which has the added bonus of being able to see one production tonight, and another two friends' thesis show on Friday.

This evening's production Wild Black Eyed Susans was a bit of a mixed bag. The script read like a lifetime movie - it had several good moments, but was overly sentimental. The set, which was our reason for going, however, was lovely. The scene shop had managed to find an old trailer home (a real one) and put it onstage. The evident rot and wear that old trailor had couldn't be reproduced with new goods!

Overall, it was a very satisfying day of reminscing.

Day 244 - 2/12/08 Again...

Courtesy of that wacky international date line. We actually arrived in Seattle 9 hours BEFORE we left Korea. The time difference is minus 24 (the date line), plus 7 (the seven times zones one physically crosses). Confused? I don't quite understand it either.

The flight from Korea was pretty bumpy. Luckily, I took a massive dose of motion-sickness medicine before we took off, which both kept me from feeling ill, and also knocked me out, so I was able to sleep through the worst of it. Cz was not so fortunate. I gave him some of my drugs mid-flight, but it was already too late to help very much. He was looking pretty green by the time we landed.

*sidenote* if you have no Drammamine (or even if you do) a hefty dab of Tiger Balm under the nose stings like hell but provides instant relief of motion sickness. Sipping ginger salts or chewing a bit of ginger also helps

Despite the roughness of the flight, we arrived in Seattle more than an hour ahead of schedule.

And breezed through customs. It went like so, and took less than half an hour, including waiting in line.

Customs Guy (CG) - How long have you been out of the country.

Us (with some trepidation) - 8 months

CG - What were you doing

Us - I got a travel grant through the UW

CG - Wow! That sounds great. Welcome home

And then we were back in the US. It was that simple.

A friend from the UW picked us up from the airport and brought us to the house of a longtime family friend. We ate lunch, and promptly conked out for nearly 5 hours, stirring only to change loads of laundry in the washing machine and dryer.

In the evening, we met up with several of our former classmates from the UW in our old haunt of the College Inn Pub. What was strange was how not-strange it felt. I expected to feel some distance or disconnect, but slipping back into old banter and designer-speak, eating nachos, and ordering beer by the pitcher for the table came as naturally as if we had never left.

In fact, it feels like we have been gone barely 8 weeks rather than 8 months. The amount of time only registers when I think about all the things we have seen, and realise that there is no way we could have done all that in a short time.

The strangest thing so far is being surrounded by American accents. For the whole trip, we have been able to get by with English, and have been surrounded by English-speaking fellow travellers, but never this saturation, this background babble of American voices.

It hasn't really sunk in yet that we are back in the country for good. Right now, it feels like just another stop in our travels, and in a sense, it is. We are visiting friends in Seattle for a few days, then heading to NY for a few days, and then on to Viriginia. We don't really stop travelling until March, when we (hopefully) move into an apartment of our very own in NYC. I expect that it won't hit me until the end of March or beginning of April. I will probably not be very pleasent to be around for a few weeks when that happens.