Adventures of a Discoverer

In Belltown, a neighborhood in downtown Seattle, for quite some years you could see an abandoned store that used to be called "Bergman Luggage". The store was located in a historic two story building erected all the way back in 1920 originally as a Ford dealership, that eventually became a luggage store, until it fell in hard times and the store closed. The building was abandoned until an artist collective decided to buy it in order to create a new artistic space in the city. Just recently the building reopened with its very first art exposition. It was a very neat idea: the artists got together and did a massive cleanup in the building, and then put all the debris that were inside the building in the first floor and added art installations on top of them. The exposition was appropriately named "Ghosts of Belltown" and I visited it yesterday: the works were very creative and made an interesting use of all the old materials that had been abandoned. After this first e...

Seattle is known to be a hilly city: pretty much anywhere you go there are lots of ups and downs. As part of that, the city has built a number of public stairs around town, so that its inhabitants can access different areas in various neighborhoods. The longest set of public stairs (and also one of the steepest) are the stairs that go from Lake Union all the way up to the top of Capitol Hill. Yesterday, with a couple of friends, we parked close to Lake Union and walked all the way up. It may look easy: but it was actually quite some exercise. According to my watch, we walked the equivalent of 32 flights of stairs, and my thighs could very much feel that. The "trail" ends at Volunteer Park, passing through the historic cemetery, at which point we visited the famous tombs of Bruce and Brandon Lee. To top it off, we climbed one final set of stairs: the stairs to the top of the historic water tower at Volunteer Park (built in 1906!) and with that we went from Lake Union to the ve...

Yesterday night I had the pleasure of getting to know a really cool establishment: the Muse Whiskey Bar & Coffee Shop, right by the water in Everett (north of Seattle). It is a very cool idea: when the old Port of Everett was renovated and became the new waterfront, a group of investors and the Port of Everett remodeled an old office building that used to belong to the Weyerhaeuser company, which used the offices to manage the shipping of tree trunks from Washington state. The remodeling transformed the building into a very nice bar and coffee shop, serving a fancy selection of whiskeys and coffees (just to give an idea, they keep some whiskeys under lock and key). The cool thing is that the internal division of the building remained, so you can get a little room with comfortable couches to enjoy your beverages. As an additional touch, I visited the place at a night with thick fog all around, so that gave a very interesting ambiance to the whole thing. I must confess, though, that ...

As I said in my  previous blog post , yesterday I paid a visit to the Northwest African American Museum, which is a really cool museum about the History, Culture and Art of African Americans in the Northwest. As in most American museums, it has a gift shop close to its exit, and it was there that I saw something that I had never seen before: a book vending machine. Everybody is used to vending machines everywhere in the US, selling drinks and snacks, but this was the first time I saw one that sold books. It looks pretty similar to the regular vending machines, and operates just the same: type the number of the book you want, pay with credit card or a smartphone, and the machine drops the book at a compartment at the bottom. In this case, this machine was dedicated to books and comic books from Pacific Northwest African American authors, with a focus on Science Fiction and Fantasy. I bought "Parable of the Sower", which is a book I had heard about before, and it seems to be re...

Yesterday I finally paid a visit to the Northwest African American Museum. I had heard about this museum for many years but I had never been to it, so it was nice to finally get to know it. The museum is situated in an old school that has been renovated and it looks pristine. It is a small but very well kept and organized museum: it shows the History and Culture of the African American population in the Pacific Northwest. This part of the country doesn't have as large an African American population as other parts of the US, so it's important to have such a museum to show the importance and the contributions of African Americans in Washington and Oregon. In addition, the museum also includes a small gallery of art by African Americans artists from the Northwest. The building used to be a school, and now it contains the museum in the first floor and the remaining floors provide housing for low income people, which seems like a good idea. Finally, the museum sits in the middle of ...