I knew my trip to Seattle a few weeks ago was going to be a quick one, but boy did we squeeze a ton of fun into a short amount of time. Seeing that I was super swamped prior to leaving for the trip, nearly all of the trip planning was done in the airport on my iPhone and iPad on my flight out of SJ, my layover in Reno, and then waiting for Emily at the SEA-TAC airport (thank you WiFi). Before the trip I did a status post asking about places to visit in Seattle and my lovely friends came through and gave some absolutely wonderful suggestions which we totally utilized to plan our adventures.
After landing in Seattle, I hung out at the gate and waited for Emily’s flight to get in from NC, and then we went to grab our rental car. Luckily, Emily just happened to get the Enterprise guy who was a HUGE Duke fan (she works at Duke) and he gave us a pretty sweet Duke blue rental. Then it was off to fill up our stomachs before meeting up with Laura downtown!
The space needle sure is hard to miss
The 5 Point Cafe, where we filled our stomachs up.
I think I ate breakfast three times that day
Yes, I know, I'm a little short. Emily's picture came out much better
Up atop the Space Needle! We were so lucky to avoid rain on Saturday!
Hooray Ben and Laura! Ben makes Laura look short. Good thing I'm not standing next to Laura. My head would probably be in the very bottom right hand corner.
Reunited!
After venturing up the Space Needle we headed over to the famous Beth’s Cafe to grab dinner (or should I say that I grabbed breakfast again). I’m all about comfort food, diners and cafes, so this was the perfect place.
I don't remember exactly what Ben got, but it was humongous. At least he got a salad to try to even it out.
Bacon waffle! Yes, bacon in the waffle.
After that we called it a night and headed back to Laura and Ben’s super cute house to relax for the rest of the night.
In the morning we took a trip to check out the Fremont Troll, and then grabbed breakfast at 5-spot in Queen Anne which Emily and Laura researched in the morning while I was still sleeping. In my defense, Emily came from the East Coast so she was already 3 hours ahead and she regularly gets up at 6am on the East Coast. Laura, from what I remember, could never sleep in even at Pomona so naturally she was awake as well. 5-Spot was a pretty awesome breakfast place with a definite line out the door for the whole time we were there.
The troll is located under a bridge in a neighborhood. Really random place to put a troll (not that there really is actually a good place) but it was pretty gosh darn cool.
A nice big screen for watching football of course. If only I had remembered to join a fantasy football league, football watching would be more fun this year. At least the niners are doing well.
"Red Flannel Hash". Corned beef hash with beets and poached eggs (that Emily thought was whipped cream).
After breakfast we headed over to the Experience Music Project Museum as suggested by Professor Taylor. If you’re an incredibly music buff, this is your space. They also had sci-fi exhibits such as an Avatar exhibit which was absolutely incredible. When we were there, there was a special exhibit about Nirvana, Jimi Hendrix, Battstar Galactica and Avatar. They also had an exhibit about horror films and had videos of all the classic horror movies as well as the recent ones.
Guitar cyclone!
Avatar heads! They actually made models of everything that they generated on the computer including all the costumes, jewlery, plants, etc.
Avatar plants
Such big shoes for Navi feet!
Horror exhibit! We took our turn in the scream booth.
After the museum we headed over to Pike Place market. First stop, Starbucks #1 
The very first starbucks! None of us got drinks, but our photographer had one which he made us hold 
It was a well suited prop!
The trip was far too short, but I’d say that we got a ton of stuff done within a day and a half of exploring. Until we meet again Seattle!
After Nashville, it was off to North Carolina! In true traveling fashion, I was sick the first two days. This was mainly a result of some extreme schedule cramming the few days before leaving for Nashville, which I think ultimately tired my body out. “Luckily” Emily didn’t take the first two days of my stay off work, so while she went to work, I got my rest in, and was charged up and ready for dinner those two days.
Carlo’s family was also in town so it was quite the party in Durham! We all went out to dinner the first night, and then walked around downtown Durham.
Front porch lunch! BLTs, sweet tea, potato chips, grapes and vanilla ice cream topped with chopped nectarines.
Duke Gardens with Em and the Diy's, feeding the ducks!
Duke Chapel --- sitting through someone else's wedding rehearsal
krkslallnaern;abn;a irweyd ville
I would have obeyed the sign on the basket, but in all honesty, I really don't get that many chances to dunk on a real rim. Shocking huh?
Battier and G.Hill!
Cameron. Just like Maples. It definitely felt a WHOLE lot smaller than it looks on TV.
Gotta represent the women too. Alana beard, one of the all-time greats
Had to take a picture sitting in these porch chairs
Outdoor concert at the American Tobacco Campus
Pigging out on tasting bites of pastrami biscuits and white cheddar and egg biscuits from Neal's Deli. Em takes such good candid eating shots! (www.nealsdeli.com)
Neal's Deli ! Carrboro, North Carolina
Benjamin Vineyards wine tasting at the Chapel Hill Farmers Market as part of Taste of Carolina food tour. Muscadine wines...so tasty!
Who knew coffee brewing had to be this precise. Timing it on his iphone and measurements in his notebook.
Delicious curry and hibiscus tea at Vimala's Curry Blossom Cafe in Chapel Hill, NC. A woman with a great story, who serves the community that she lives in. ( http://www.curryblossom.com)
Who would have thought that I would see more Pomona people in NC than I have in a few months. I wish I had gotten a picture with Thandiwe and Jordan. It sure didn’t feel like 4 years had passed since we had seen each other. So thankful for wonderful friends with incredible passions.
Emily's homemade okra and tomatoes! So delicious! Coupled with a bojangles sausage biscuit!
Dame's Chicken and Waffles! The perfect morning brunch before heading home...even if we did have to wait hours to eat.
Until next time North Carolina!
It’s always the best when you get together with old friends and rehash all the good old days. My friend/teammate Jen from high school came up to the Bay Area from San Diego for a wedding and last night we got together, had some dessert and just caught up. I say that she’s a friend from high school, but we definitely knew each other in middle school, and maybe even before then.
There’s something about being around people that you can just sit and do nothing with and still have the best time ever. I guess that’s what makes them great friends. We got to talking about how we’ve all gotten older and moved away from each other, and how once you start working, it really takes effort to catch up with people and hang out. Last night I re-realized something that I also thought about on my recent trip to Nashville and North Carolina. I always fail to reconcile how many memories I have of events that are stored in OTHER people’s minds. I think I came across this face in my Social Neuroscience course at Pomona College, where a journal article that I was reading was discussing why people get depressed when they get divorced. It’s not necessarily the fact that they miss the other person, but if you spend a part of your life with someone, there are pieces of memories that you rely on the other person to remember for you because they were there with you. Not having access to those memories is what is actually “depressing”. This is kind of similar to seeing something that reminds you of an inside joke with another person. Imagine if that person wasn’t around for you to share that with anymore, and you kept seeing things that reminded you of conversations that you had or things that you had done, but you couldn’t share it with that person.
The more I catch up with people that were a significant part of my life, or even some of those who I didn’t know very well, but were in the same social environment, the happier I become.
In Nashville and North Carolina I got to relive moments from high school basketball and college life that weren’t necessarily heavily ingrained in my long-term memory, but when Vickie or Emily brought up certain stories or events, things started to flood back into my mind that I never would have been able to recall on my own. Last night Jen and I relived memories of old elementary, junior high, and high school teachers, old technology that we used to play with such as AIM profiles, AIM buddy icons, Winamp, Winamp skins. We also allowed ourselves to feel old by acknowledging the fact that Facebook wasn’t around, and how some high school teachers back when we had them were probably our age now, when they were teaching us.
I’m really happy that I got the chance to catch up with Jen last night even though I definitely stayed out way past my bedtime. I definitely paid the price for it a little bit as I struggled to get myself out of bed to make it to my 7:45am class, but conversations of that type, no matter at what hour, are priceless.
Groupon to the rescue! A really great vegan bakery & sandwich shop
One of the best parts about vacation is being able to eat your heart out. I’d say that was “mission accomplished” on this trip out to Nashville to visit Vickie. The first place we hit up was Fiddlecakes — and we used a Groupon that we bought a few weeks before to grub out on some delicious sandwiches. Vickie got the the “french toastie” which was all natural ham, tomato, brie, and blueberry mustard. I got “the standard” which was a panini with chicken, provolone, roasted red pepper, spinach and veganaise.
The Standard
After brunch/lunch Vickie gave me a quick tour of Nashville and we made our way to the Nashville Humane Society. Vickie found the love of her life in a cute puppy, and I became enamored by a room of adorable kittens. I’m pretty sure I could have sat in the kitten room for hours.
Then, I made Vickie go to Dairy Queen with me. Dairy Queen is one of those establishments that really reminds me of my childhood in Minnesota. When we first moved to Minnesota when I was 3 years old, our first apartment building was located across the street from a Dairy Queen. I always loved those nights after dinner where we would walk across the street and I would get a vanilla cone or a chocolate dipped cone and my parents would get a blizzard. We ate our ice cream and watched Family Feud on the in-store TV with some locals who were having lunch. It’s the small things in life that I absolutely love.
Soft serve ice cream on a humid Nashville day
We were exhausted, and took naps in the afternoon, woke up around dinner time and watched Diners, Drive-ins and Dives, and realized that we wanted Italian food for dinner. We found ourselves at Mafioza’s, which was packed, and sat on the outdoor patio, watched the Braves vs Cubs game on the tv and shared a free pitcher of beer, courtesy of Vickie’s softball league. Might I add, that the beer was drank out of mason jars!
After dinner we met up with Vickie’s roommate Diddy and some of Vickie’s friends at Red Door, a local bar. The atmosphere definitely reminded me of Portland and San Francisco. We made some friends at the table next to us who were helping their guy friend figure out what to text back to a girl that he was interested in and they wanted our two cents on what he should say.
Nashville has a pretty great food scene with some neat local restaurants, including one of Vickie and Diddy’s favorite, Mas Tacos. Mas Tacos started off as a taco truck but they were so popular that they they bought a small establishment in East Nashville and have been serving tacos and specialties such as gazpacho, tortilla soup and elote, and some creative tacos such as a pulled pork taco, quinoa and sweet potato taco, a fish taco, and a breakfast taco.
Mas Tacos por favor! A sweet little shack that started out as a taco truck! Elote, tacos, and aquas frescas (pineapple-cilantro and watermelon-lime). How cute is this outdoor seating?
Elote!! Corn with queso fresco and chili powder. SO GOOD.
Fish tacos and pulled pork tacos. They were so filling that it was hard to even eat 2 of them.
After lunch we hit up the Tomato Art festival in East Nashville. The festival was big! There was tons of vendors and so many people from the community gathered in one place. On our walk to the festival from the car, we passed people sitting on their porches having a great time, a little girl selling lemonade and brownies for 50cents–hollering at the top of her lungs, and a guy riding a vespa with a red helmet on — and the red helmet had a tomato stem coming out of the top
tomato art festival 2011! tomato art, tomato crafts, tomato food, tomato everythinggggg + music !
Some cool nashville screenprints done by a local artist
And then we passed this sign....Chiens = dogs ??? hahaha no wonder she loves dogs!
Later that day Vickie got asked to work the Titans vs Minnesota Vikings preseason game at LP field, and since I had never been to a football game before, I thought that it would be fun to go and watch her own it on the sidelines directing commercial breaks. I scoured craigslist and found some awesome seats in the lower section of the endzone, for $25 a ticket.
Tickets in hand and ready to roll!
My friend Nick who moved to Nashville a year ago to teach came along with a friend. We ate at the German brewhouse across from the Stadium before the game and the walked over afterwards. It wasn’t until we got to the stadium did we realize exactly HOW close the seats were. To top it off, Nick’s other friends had 4 season tickets to the game, and low and behold, their seats were right behind us. What are the chances of that?
Can you find Vickie on the Titans sideline?
After the game we walked around downtown Nashville and got to see some of the “honky tonk” bars. There’s nothing like walking down the street hearing country music everywhere you go. It was awesome. We went and visited the old bar/restaurant that Vickie used to work at called Baileys and met some of her coworkers and chatted upstairs on the patio. The other thing that I love about Nashville is that there is always so much outdoor seating at restaurant and bars.
On Sunday morning we went to The Copper Kettle for brunch. It was the most extensive brunch buffet that I had ever seen. Eggs benedict, prime rib, noodle salad, a million types of pastries, tomato mozzarella salad, etc. I wish I had a picture to post, but I totally forgot to take one. Then I joined Vickie and her former Bailey’s coworkers for their double header softball game where they CRUSHED the other opponents. I’m still getting over the ridiculous tan that I got that day. I did not think that I could get any darker than I was when I arrived in Nashville, but as it turns out, I was definitely wrong. These days, in order to get dressed for work, I put on different shirts and assess how much white skin vs tan skin can be seen and to what degree I may be embarrassed by the tan line that shows.
Nashville was so much cooler than I could have imagined in my head. It’s kind of funny how much I like the south. Until next time Nashville!
Next up, North Carolina adventures
**I’ve decided that I want to start blogging again. Well ok fine, this is more of a way to get my friend Emily to START a blog I promised that I would blog more if she would start a blog. Of course, I have no power in actually getting her to do so, but maybe making it public on my blog will nudge her. *wink*
I wanted to write a post tonight, but I’m still jet lagged from my trip to the east cost so I’m going to actually publish a post that I wrote a couple months ago but never made public.
Picture/post from the trip to come soon!
- CT
——–
6/3/2011
Two weeks ago I finished reading “Water for Elephants” and it was brilliant. For some reason, I tend to really enjoy books/movies set in the older times, and this book really painted a picture of the trials and tribulations of an old-timey circus trying to make ends meet.
I just found “Circus” on Netflix, which is a documentary series about the circus life, following the Big Apple Circus from New York. It is obviously less crazy than an old-timey circus where they are scrounging for pennies and trying to find things to feed the animals. No one is getting thrown out of the railroad cars and drinking moonshine, but the narration is just as interesting.
I’d say that this would have to be my second favorite series next to “Airline” which follows Southwest Airlines flight attendants on the job.
happen just like that.
That line from the song “Unsinkable Ships” by Joe Nichols has been playing over and over in my head.
There are just things you can’t prepare for…and being the person that likes to be prepared all the time (or at least try to be prepared), that scares the living daylights out of me.
I keep having nightmares centered around missing precalc classes and having no idea when tests are and never doing any homework assignments. Someone interpret this please. Can I add that I got an A in precalc in HS as a sophomore so really this makes no sense at all.
Recent Comments