Underground ("It's only forever/ It's not long at all...")
Yesterday Dominic and I discovered the underground city that is the shopping district of Tacoma. We began at Freighthouse Square, an unassuming city block dotted with various raggedy, chain-smoking and obviously close-knit clutches of Tacoma denizens. Slip through one of the many unadorned doorways, climb a darkened stairway or creep along a shadowy hallway towards the faint sounds of music and echoed laughter and suddenly you have entered a fantastic world of shops, whose miraculous and tenuous existence (due to their oddness and smallness and overall invisibility to the public eye) puts one in mind of fairy folk. And the folk who inhabit this strange place seem to be just that, tucked away into their respective alcoves and maintaining their respective strange and wonderful corners of un-reality, all seemingly connected to one another, occasionally flitting to and fro between the shops to chat with one another and to gossip about the comings and goings of us mortal folk.
Crystals, herbs, bones, wax, silver daggers, fairy wings (!), various taxidermied creatures and preserved specimens including a mummified possum with dead roses tucked into the cavity of its hollow belly- along with an assortment of homemade jewelry, plastic oddities and the sorts of things fairies might make, find or be amused by fill the entirety of the invisible insides of this city block. The shop amongst them that can now count my heart among the peculiar specimens in its possession is called Wunderkammer (noun: 1. A place where a collection of curiosities and rarities is exhibited). It is home to the possum, and, perhaps even more notably, to a human finger, lent the shop by a friend of theirs. (It is not for sale).
Having already partaken of their treasures, my haul so far including an ancient-looking book of “gypsy” remedies, a beautiful amethyst ring, and a moon-white bone from the spinal column of a deer (found already picked clean and sun-bleached beneath an eagle’s nest, or so we were told!), we decided to head for the food court.
Eating fairy food is, of course, not generally advised, as it leads to mortals being trapped forever in the realm of Faerie, but it really didn’t seem like a bad idea at the time. As might be guessed, they offer a wide array of foods, from Indian to Vietnamese to Thai to hamburgers. Freshly baked, homemade cinnamon rolls (with optional orange zest) also number among their offerings. While the Vietnamese food (in my case, unexpectedly massive quantities of garlic chicken and veggies and stir fry) ranks high on my list of foods tried so far, the Indian food is far and away the most impressive. The chicken in my chicken masala (aka butter chicken) was of an excellent quality, light meat through and through, with the most flavorful and tangy “butter” sauce I have encountered yet. It was accompanied with a light salad, with real lettuce and a light drizzle of dressing, which we instructed us to eat alongside the meal, as it functioned as a chutney. We did. It was delicious. It is also worth noting that I have never yet found an Indian food that surpassed butter chicken in my mind, but Dominic’s Royal Biryani with lamb came dangerously close (andmayhaveactuallydoneitokayyesmaybeitdid), being complex and filled with complementary ingredients and flavors, the nature of which I hope to observe more closely the next time we go there. Hopefully soon.
From the magical Freighthouse square we continued to similarly hidden and fantastic corners of Tacoma including an antique shopped named Rampizi, and Sanford and Sons’ Antiques and Auctions, a mazelike and truly underground wonderland that fully deserves its own entry-we left about half of it unexplored, for the next time we go. Mad Hat Tea, the tea shop where we began our most recent day in Tacoma, also deserves its own entry, though I will say that their Brain Tea (ginkgo biloba, kava, mad orange, ginger, and yerba mate) had interesting effects.
Also extant in Tacoma-a Taco Time in a church, and a library next to a jail. We did not make it or even attempt to make it to the former, but did stop in at the latter for precious wifi and internet-map-making. (Mad Hat Tea does not have wifi, or allow phones to be used within their shop. For this alone, I love them).
This journal entry marks the actually-happening of a New Years' resolution of mine (write more!). I had many this year, an actual list. May the revolving of the earth around the sun again see its echo in personal revolutions for all of us. Let’s all (r)evolve together. :)
Crystals, herbs, bones, wax, silver daggers, fairy wings (!), various taxidermied creatures and preserved specimens including a mummified possum with dead roses tucked into the cavity of its hollow belly- along with an assortment of homemade jewelry, plastic oddities and the sorts of things fairies might make, find or be amused by fill the entirety of the invisible insides of this city block. The shop amongst them that can now count my heart among the peculiar specimens in its possession is called Wunderkammer (noun: 1. A place where a collection of curiosities and rarities is exhibited). It is home to the possum, and, perhaps even more notably, to a human finger, lent the shop by a friend of theirs. (It is not for sale).
Having already partaken of their treasures, my haul so far including an ancient-looking book of “gypsy” remedies, a beautiful amethyst ring, and a moon-white bone from the spinal column of a deer (found already picked clean and sun-bleached beneath an eagle’s nest, or so we were told!), we decided to head for the food court.
Eating fairy food is, of course, not generally advised, as it leads to mortals being trapped forever in the realm of Faerie, but it really didn’t seem like a bad idea at the time. As might be guessed, they offer a wide array of foods, from Indian to Vietnamese to Thai to hamburgers. Freshly baked, homemade cinnamon rolls (with optional orange zest) also number among their offerings. While the Vietnamese food (in my case, unexpectedly massive quantities of garlic chicken and veggies and stir fry) ranks high on my list of foods tried so far, the Indian food is far and away the most impressive. The chicken in my chicken masala (aka butter chicken) was of an excellent quality, light meat through and through, with the most flavorful and tangy “butter” sauce I have encountered yet. It was accompanied with a light salad, with real lettuce and a light drizzle of dressing, which we instructed us to eat alongside the meal, as it functioned as a chutney. We did. It was delicious. It is also worth noting that I have never yet found an Indian food that surpassed butter chicken in my mind, but Dominic’s Royal Biryani with lamb came dangerously close (andmayhaveactuallydoneitokayyesmaybeitdid), being complex and filled with complementary ingredients and flavors, the nature of which I hope to observe more closely the next time we go there. Hopefully soon.
From the magical Freighthouse square we continued to similarly hidden and fantastic corners of Tacoma including an antique shopped named Rampizi, and Sanford and Sons’ Antiques and Auctions, a mazelike and truly underground wonderland that fully deserves its own entry-we left about half of it unexplored, for the next time we go. Mad Hat Tea, the tea shop where we began our most recent day in Tacoma, also deserves its own entry, though I will say that their Brain Tea (ginkgo biloba, kava, mad orange, ginger, and yerba mate) had interesting effects.
Also extant in Tacoma-a Taco Time in a church, and a library next to a jail. We did not make it or even attempt to make it to the former, but did stop in at the latter for precious wifi and internet-map-making. (Mad Hat Tea does not have wifi, or allow phones to be used within their shop. For this alone, I love them).
This journal entry marks the actually-happening of a New Years' resolution of mine (write more!). I had many this year, an actual list. May the revolving of the earth around the sun again see its echo in personal revolutions for all of us. Let’s all (r)evolve together. :)