Wedding Trip, Day 8

[krasnoludek]

Tue 7/29. We got back from the nightclubs after 3 and didn't fall asleep until 3:30am (I desperately needed a shower). Unfortunately, I had to wake up at 6am to walk to the parking garage to move the car. For some reason the garage's machine hadn't let us extend our parking period past 6:24am, so that's why I had to move it so early in the morning. I parked it outside the hotel, then went back to sleep, then woke up two hours later to put in coins into the meter once the meters went into effect. On top of that, today was my day to drive. I was so exhausted by the time we got into Seattle that when we showed up at Brianna and Noah's we just wanted to do some simple, low-key activities. First, for lunch we went to Paseo's sandwiches, which were extremely good but had a bit too much jalapeno pepper for my liking (in the sense that it seemed to overpower everything else). I had a seared scallop one and Christian had pork shoulder. We saw the statue of Lenin in Fremont, as well as the Fremont Troll. After that, we went to Theo's chocolate factory on the hope that some people booked for the tour wouldn't show up and we could get in. Lucky us, all four of us made it in. The tour was very similar to Scharffen Berger's, except they didn't have an actual cacao fruit to pass around and the tour guide was very bad about asking whether we had questions. The premium chocolate was very similar to Sch's in terms of its high quality and distinctive regional flavors. The mixed flavors were sometimes bizarre (e.g. coconut curry, which tasted more like pumpkin spice to me), but interesting. We bought a few bars to take home as gifts. Christian spent 15 minutes at the end of the tour correcting the tour guide that Quetzalcoatl is Aztec and not Mayan and these are two very, very different peoples. She said she knew that and it was simply a slip of the tongue, so then Christian let out his second correction: her assertion that Montezuma would pronounce "chocolate" as "chocola-tay" was wrong. Cortes, being Spanish, would say "chocola-tay", whereas Montezuma, being Aztec, would have said "chocolatl", from which the Spanish (and subsequently English) were derived. Brianna, Noah and I were snickering from the sidelines as we watched her body language show clear disinterest after five minutes, despite her persistently perky verbal responses. However, Brianna aptly observed "what good is having a PhD if you can't correct people when they say something wrong in your area of expertise?" PhD doctorates, the castigators of the common people :-)

We talked a bit more with Brianna and Noah before saying goodbye and heading to Nick & Denise's to spend the night in their empty apartment. We went to a local neighborhood and had a pizza that was much tastier and more similar to East Coast pizza than these California "pizzerias". We then headed back to the house and were so tired of walking and driving and being up so much that we just crashed and decided to get up early in the morning and pack. No experiencing the wonderful amenities of Nick & Denise's house this time...