Seattle recap
Y'all, I had the most amazing time on my trip to Sherlock Seattle. The con was the friendliest, funnest, and most fabulous collection of people I have encountered in ages. The programming was excellent. It was an A++ con experience, so thank you to dameruth and yamx for helping to prod me into attending. I also had a really good time doing the tourist thing in Seattle before the con. I have something of a city-crush now. I loved all the public art and the rather nerdy character of the city. (There is an entire store devoted to Utilikilts!) I just want to move to Seattle and spend my time drinking lattes while gazing at Puget Sound and waiting for the bus in the rain before going to hang out with the really cool local Sherlockians.
I think trying to get my whole trip into one blog post would get ridiculously long, so this is the post about what I did before Sherlock Seattle properly started. I'll post a more detailed con report in a bit.
My the hostel where I spent my pre-con time was located across the street from Pike Place Market, a wonderful labyrinth of vendors selling seafood, fresh produce, crafts, and all manner of random stuff. (There was an entire booth of wind-up toys, for example.) The hostel's free breakfast was a little sparse, so I started out days there by wandering into the market to get baked goods for second breakfast. On Wednesday morning, it was cold and somewhat rainy but I went on a walking tour of downtown anyway. That was a fun introduction to the city, plus it included some free samples of food to provide a bit of warmth. In the afternoon I walked over to a museum called the EMP (Experience Music Project), which I wanted to see because they have exhibits devoted to science fiction, fantasy, and horror in pop culture. They had all sorts of movie props and documents, including Inigo Montoya's sword and several costumes from the Princess Bride, pages from drafts of the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings with Tolkien's edits, David Bowie's Goblin King costume from Labyrinth (yes, the mannequin displaying the costume had a suitably obvious crotch bulge), a Dalek (from Remembrance of the Daleks, I think), Uhura's dress from original series Star Trek, a spectacular feathered cloak from Snow White & the Huntsman, and Mr. Pointy the stake from Buffy. There was lots more. The fantasy section of the exhibit had a really cool dragon sculpture (well, the head and tail sections, with the rest appearing to rest in a cavern behind a wall) that sounded like it was breathing and a tree made of mirror fragments. There were also exhibits on random bits of music history (I went through the ones about the history of the electric guitar and Jimi Hendrix before running out of time in the museum). I walked around the base of the Space Needle but decided not to pay to go up, then took the monorail back across town. The monorail is a relict from Seattle's World's Fair and only goes two places, but it goes between those stops very fast and it's pretty entertaining because MONORAIL.
The next day was free admission day at the Seattle Art Museum, so I took advantage of that. I joined up with a free gallery tour that turned out to only cover the modern galleries. While it was useful to get some guidance on the inscrutable minimalist art, the tour took long enough that I was footsore and hungry by the time I was done, which meant that I had a harder time giving proper attention to the art I was more interested in, especially the really cool collection of Pacific Northwest Native American art. I liked that in almost all of the art from non-Western traditions, the museum included both older traditional pieces and also recent works that explore the artists' cultural heritage with modern materials and ideas.
After the art museum, I went to the main branch of the Seattle Public Library because I'd heard it had neat architecture. That library is MAGICAL. I want to move in. The building is cool, with sharply angled outer walls of glass and big open spaces, but it also had tons of fun touches. Floors 6-9 were actually not really separate floors but a gently-sloping spiral. One floor, devoted to offices and conference spaces, had corridors where everything from ceiling to floor was super bright red. The walls on that level were curvy, so it was like walking down the throat of a huge animal. The book return system was a cool overhead conveyor belt contraption. The coffee cart in the lobby sold me one of the best mochas I've ever had.
After the library, I rode the bus to Kerry Park, a small public park located on a hillside that gives dramatic views of the city skyline. The weather had cleared up dramatically from the previous day. There were distant clouds in some directions that blocked out Mt. Rainier, but the city and the sound looked glorious in the late afternoon light.
That evening, I went to a pre-con dinner meetup with about ten Sherlockians who were already in town. That was a ton of fun. The restaurant wisely seated us well away from any other patrons, so we had loud and enthusiastic discussions of things like shipping and the Omegaverse. I was grateful for the chance to get to know a few new people in a small group context before the con.
Friday morning, I had some time before the con, so I had another wander around the market and ended up buying these really soft cashmere wrist warmers with appliqued stars. Then I headed over to a skyscraper called the Columbia Center. You had to pay if you wanted to go to the 73rd-floor viewing area, but I'd learned on the walking tour that there was a Starbucks on the 40th floor, so I had a pumpkin spice latte while enjoying some really impressive views of city, sound, and distant mountains. And then it was off to the Capitol Hill neighborhood in preparation for Sherlock Seattle!
I think trying to get my whole trip into one blog post would get ridiculously long, so this is the post about what I did before Sherlock Seattle properly started. I'll post a more detailed con report in a bit.
My the hostel where I spent my pre-con time was located across the street from Pike Place Market, a wonderful labyrinth of vendors selling seafood, fresh produce, crafts, and all manner of random stuff. (There was an entire booth of wind-up toys, for example.) The hostel's free breakfast was a little sparse, so I started out days there by wandering into the market to get baked goods for second breakfast. On Wednesday morning, it was cold and somewhat rainy but I went on a walking tour of downtown anyway. That was a fun introduction to the city, plus it included some free samples of food to provide a bit of warmth. In the afternoon I walked over to a museum called the EMP (Experience Music Project), which I wanted to see because they have exhibits devoted to science fiction, fantasy, and horror in pop culture. They had all sorts of movie props and documents, including Inigo Montoya's sword and several costumes from the Princess Bride, pages from drafts of the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings with Tolkien's edits, David Bowie's Goblin King costume from Labyrinth (yes, the mannequin displaying the costume had a suitably obvious crotch bulge), a Dalek (from Remembrance of the Daleks, I think), Uhura's dress from original series Star Trek, a spectacular feathered cloak from Snow White & the Huntsman, and Mr. Pointy the stake from Buffy. There was lots more. The fantasy section of the exhibit had a really cool dragon sculpture (well, the head and tail sections, with the rest appearing to rest in a cavern behind a wall) that sounded like it was breathing and a tree made of mirror fragments. There were also exhibits on random bits of music history (I went through the ones about the history of the electric guitar and Jimi Hendrix before running out of time in the museum). I walked around the base of the Space Needle but decided not to pay to go up, then took the monorail back across town. The monorail is a relict from Seattle's World's Fair and only goes two places, but it goes between those stops very fast and it's pretty entertaining because MONORAIL.
The next day was free admission day at the Seattle Art Museum, so I took advantage of that. I joined up with a free gallery tour that turned out to only cover the modern galleries. While it was useful to get some guidance on the inscrutable minimalist art, the tour took long enough that I was footsore and hungry by the time I was done, which meant that I had a harder time giving proper attention to the art I was more interested in, especially the really cool collection of Pacific Northwest Native American art. I liked that in almost all of the art from non-Western traditions, the museum included both older traditional pieces and also recent works that explore the artists' cultural heritage with modern materials and ideas.
After the art museum, I went to the main branch of the Seattle Public Library because I'd heard it had neat architecture. That library is MAGICAL. I want to move in. The building is cool, with sharply angled outer walls of glass and big open spaces, but it also had tons of fun touches. Floors 6-9 were actually not really separate floors but a gently-sloping spiral. One floor, devoted to offices and conference spaces, had corridors where everything from ceiling to floor was super bright red. The walls on that level were curvy, so it was like walking down the throat of a huge animal. The book return system was a cool overhead conveyor belt contraption. The coffee cart in the lobby sold me one of the best mochas I've ever had.
After the library, I rode the bus to Kerry Park, a small public park located on a hillside that gives dramatic views of the city skyline. The weather had cleared up dramatically from the previous day. There were distant clouds in some directions that blocked out Mt. Rainier, but the city and the sound looked glorious in the late afternoon light.
That evening, I went to a pre-con dinner meetup with about ten Sherlockians who were already in town. That was a ton of fun. The restaurant wisely seated us well away from any other patrons, so we had loud and enthusiastic discussions of things like shipping and the Omegaverse. I was grateful for the chance to get to know a few new people in a small group context before the con.
Friday morning, I had some time before the con, so I had another wander around the market and ended up buying these really soft cashmere wrist warmers with appliqued stars. Then I headed over to a skyscraper called the Columbia Center. You had to pay if you wanted to go to the 73rd-floor viewing area, but I'd learned on the walking tour that there was a Starbucks on the 40th floor, so I had a pumpkin spice latte while enjoying some really impressive views of city, sound, and distant mountains. And then it was off to the Capitol Hill neighborhood in preparation for Sherlock Seattle!