Seeing Seattle’s Seas

In a pitiful attempt to introduce new scheduled posts à la Musical Mondays, it’s time to pitifully attempt to schedule new introduction posts with a new tag: Vendredis de Vacances! Which means ‘Fridays of Vacation’ in French, which I had to make in french to keep its alliterative qualities, for no weekday begins with a ‘V’. Anyhow, these posts will have me talk about my ~marvelous adventures~ in being an overbearing first-world snob and wasting money on frivolous tours.

So. Yep. Seattle. Again.

It’s a vacation post. Expect pretty pictures. Prepare for letdown. (HINT: The link in the above paragraph actually contains PRETTY PICTURES!!) Death of my life, it’s my character to only take ugly pictures

Sometime someday last or last last last week (yes, I’m brilliant at remembering dates), my family and I went to SEATTLE. In fact, we went to SEE Seattle. In de facto fact, we went to want to see Seattle’s attles. Wait, attles isn’t a word. Because it’s plural. Attles is two words.

What did we do there? Well…

We didn’t go to the Space Needle. Neither did we visit the Seattle Art Museum (although we did get hammere-uh, took a picture of the hammerin’ man above). Instead, we went to the coolest place, the largest building by volume in the ENTIRE WORLD: the Boeing Everett Factory.

It was stunning.

Except not really, because walking a mile during our tour of the factory was necessitated, so we couldn’t be stunned. They would have to, like, roll us around on a cart if we were stunned. Here, I’ll intersperse pictures of other things while I continue talking about the Boeing Factory tour because we can’t take pictures of TOP-SECRET CLASSIFIED PLANES that fly around to every single country in the civilized world and have hundreds of thousands of people sit in them every single day. Nice top secret there.

Some skyscraper that either has a vast cloth hanging over its windows, a hanging mural, or a flat pillar of reinforced steel. Probably the latter, because it’s hard to paint new clouds every 5 minutes.

The tour was quite enlightening. The factory is simply enormous (is that an oxymoron?). It employs upwards of thirty thousand people and contains its own dedicated restaurants (13 of them!), fire department, hospital, and even credit union. (Unfortunately, we visited on Sunday, so we only saw overtime employees. I’d like to see the commotion of a busy Monday morning in such a huge facility.) There are almost 4 kilometres of tunnels under the factory, where apparently employees would often jog during breaks, and the factory contained almost a dozen planes in assembly, capable of producing one every three days.

When the factory was built, it was so spacious that clouds formed near the ceiling. I’m not even lying here. I might be if I had a laptop and I had the propensity to write posts in bed, but I’m currently sitting and divulging the absolute truth. (Now, they use complicated air conditioning magic to make sure nobody rains on their parade. Or, uh, on their assembly line.)

Some sunset taken near a casino that my dad decided to waste our last $25 USD in before heading back to Canada. He wasted it. P.S. Casino washrooms are frightfully clean.

The building, with its metal catwalks and army of overhead cranes, with its yellow and blue machinery and in-factory desks (the entire factory is an assembly line, so every few days I suppose they move the equipment surrounding the airplanes so they aren’t crushed by its mass), with its toned factory floor and welcoming artificiality reminds me of Portal 2. Suppose Valve got their inspiration from the Boeing Everett Factory?

Speaking of Valve, my brother, a profoundly stupid individual, was recruited by Google to lead their stupidity team in being stupid. So, he’s left to the magical land of ~CALIFORNIA~ (with a population greater than the entirety of Canada) for the duration of the summer.

However, before he left, he went for a week-long trip to the magical city of ~POLAND~ in the magical country of ~WARSAW~. Notice that ~WARSAW~ is a country, whereas Warsaw is merely a city. Also notice that Poland is a country, whereas ~POLAND~ is merely a city. The complexity of tilde rules always baffles me. Mushyrulez are so much simpler.

The picture above is from Warsaw’s Old Town (Stare Miasto. No, don’t stare my ass too). My brother was usually reticent about his adventures (as opposed to being unusually reticent), and thus, I am clueless as to exactly how many gangsters buffeted him at the buffets. The picture below is from the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. I would crack a quip (or a whip) but the previous line murderously slaughtered all remaining vestiges of humour from this post. Damn.

And now, for something completely different: Seattle.

Yep, back to reality/history.

After visiting the Boeing Everett Factory, we expressly sped to the heart of Seattle: its… uh… heart.

Seattle’s almost exactly the same as Vancouver, but it just feels… different (as opposed to it feeling the same!). Maybe it’s because the sun was blazing infernos that day even as our tour guides mourned Seattle’s perpetually rainy weather. Now that’s something I can relate to… except not really, because Seattle and Vancouver are both hopelessly dry during the summer months. In fact, Vancouver barely makes the top five list of rainiest cities in Canada! (So what the heck was with that sudden 15-minute hailstorm during that one clear Saturday?)

Some parking lot that juts out saliently from the cement in some sort of post-modern avant-garde artistic expression of parking lots that jut out saliently. Yes, I just learned new words today.

Enough comparing Seattle to Vancouver. Let’s compare Seattle to Tacoma, a place our tour guides painted not very attractively. Although the filmmakers weren’t our tourguides and weren’t from Seattle, I’m sure they share similar sentiments. Did I mention our tour guides? No? Did I mention our tour? Yes?

Well, guess what, I’m mentioning both again. Our second attraction in Seattle was the famous Underground Tour, a tour of Seattle’s… uh, Underground. Read that link I gave you: we received that introduction, verbatim, upon our (late) arrival into Doc Maynard’s Public House. This is important because until I scrounged up that link, I was staunch in my belief that the tour guides’ constant wit were all on the spot spontaneities (when in fact they’re actually… SPANISH SHOCK, REHEARSED! *keels over*)

Nevertheless, man, did they have wit! The Underground Tour was entertaining as [insert name for the underground location where a certain fallen angel was cast into], and I strongly recommend it for all who stop by the area.

The pictures are, as I said, of Seattle’s Underground Tour and NOT of my basement, unlike what some may allege. “Hey wait,” you won’t ask, “How did you publish this post /after/ Glo totally ripped it apart?” Well…

>_>

Anyways, about the Tour.

Much of the information they gave us was utterly useless. There is no possible way I can possibly use them in the possible future, other than for writing this post nobody will ever read. In fact, there is absolutely no reason why I would ever seek to learn this information had I not been in this tour.

Does this possibly sound familiar? No, of course it doesn’t. Let’s modify the last sentence:

In fact, there is absolutely no reason why I would ever seek to learn this information had I not been given a test on the subject matter.

Some picture that is not of my basement.

Ah. Now you don’t see what I’m getting at. What I am saying is that what we are ‘learning’ in say, Socials class, is utterly and undeniably useless. Exploring Roman history or French conquests is no different from knowing about American colonist settlemnts and urban redesigning schemes in Seattle. The few that are going to use this information do not need to memorize it to regurgitate on an examination (pretty mental image that conjures up), but can research it on the magical invention known as the shining rectangular panel that blinks flashing lights at you whenever you press down on buttons connected to a rubber rope (what I’m referring to is a computer).

We do not /need/ to learn this, and it will not be useful; but does that mean we should not? No! This Underground Tour was entertaining and educational; even if I’m not going to use this information, darn, it was fun! And that’s that. We have to make education more fun. Instead of mandating ‘learning’, why don’t we just let kids learn by themselves? I sure enjoyed the tour, even though it was really just an interactive lecture. Learning should never be a chore. It should be fun, and filled with really, really lame jokes like the one following:

“You see this wall that looks like it had a sledgehammer taken to it?”

“Yeah. Why? What happened to it?”

“Well, we took a sledgehammer to it.”

The Underground Tour guys even replied to my tweet that mentioned how cool they were, even though I didn’t even know they even had a Twitter account! Even! Odd! Oddly even. Evenly odd.

And now, our third, and final visiting location in Seattle was the Pike Place Public Market, as publicly marketed and pikely placed above. It’s one of the most historic (that is to say, has its own history article on Wikipedia) sites in Seattle, and was quite an experience!

By ‘quite an experience’, I mean ‘we bought some frozen crab salad… thing, walked around the market once, and promptly sped back home for some good ol’ fashioned cheap American buffets’. Of course, the buffet served Chinese food, because real Canadians don’t eat American food.

That’s because Canadian food always needs some…

…Polish.

(Yes, that was a picture of Poland.)
(No, that pun had nothing to do with Chinese food.)
(Yes, I got sick from pollen allergies at Seattle (my usual hobby for Sundays is staying at home slouched in my chair pretending to write posts for O-New while actually just slouching in my chair doing nothing at all) and from sleeping in an overheated car for an hour and a half while my parents went shopping.)
(No, there was no reason for me to put that pun there.)
(Yes, this post is over.)