Seattle and around

Well, during the three months in Redmond I tried to not loose any time. When I was not working I was either sleeping or exploring what western state Washington and its habitants have to offer a traveller and/or a longer term resident. In fact, the "exploration" was the activity I invested most energy in. Having had no time to blog while in Redmond, I'd like to give a few very brief impressions here for the benefit of friends and family. I will also briefly report on my trips to San Francisco, Vancouver and Los Angeles in separate posts.

There are some really amazing spots in Washington state if you like nature. Mt. Rainier National Park is simply amazing (see photos below). I went hiking there a few times before it got too cold and I found the nature quite stunning.

Seattle itself is a nice town. There is nothing particularly special in terms of architecture there, but it makes a nice and cosy impression (unfortunately I forgot to make any good photos of Seattle centre). The Redmond-Bellevue area is a giant suburb. Except for Bellevue downtown and Seattle itself, there are no tall buildings around, but the houses never stop. This particular American-style never ending suburb is well looked after. The local economy is strongly dominated by high-tech companies and the average income is thus relatively high in comparison to most of the US. On the Microsoft campus itself, every lawn is naturally well looked after by a gardener.

When I arrived in late August I was advised to take advantage of the few remaining summer days and to do as much outdoors as possible. It turned out that the September 2008 would be a particularly nice one for the area and I had several weeks of nice weather. It was not until some time into October that the sky turned grey. As locals have promised, it remained grey for every day thereafter an will probably continue doing so until some time in April.

The night-life scene in Redmond is... well, there is none. But that is what I had expected – in this respect Redmond is nothing more than a suburb of Seattle and if you want to go out, that is where you need to be heading. Seattle itself is a surprisingly exciting town for its size and its demographics. Being just over half a million in size (that it, Seattle itself, not counting the endless suburbs of the metropolitan area which would bring the population size to round about 3 million), Seattle is dominated by high-tech industry and thus by young families and single male engineers. Nevertheless, at least for the brief time I’ve been there I did not experience any shortage of bars, pubs and clubs. If you visit the city, check out the relaxed pubs of Capitol Hill, the trendy bars of Belltown, and the chaotic clubs around Pioneer Square. Besides all these places I have met a lot of fun people, and, after all, house parties are always most fun.

Although the climate in western Washington is very similar to northern Europe, and the average temperatures during any month are not much different from what I know from northern Germany and south England, I have experienced a beautiful golden autumn I have not seen in western Europe before. After all, Seattle is almost in Canada.

In summary, if you can deal with a lot of grey skies, Seattle can be a great place to live. But on that 10th of November I had had just about as much grey sky as I could take. I was going to have a layover in L.A. before taking off back to Australia.

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Greg Paperin

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