the other day i pulled my favorite camera out from the to shelf of the front hall closet. mainly because i knew it had an exposed, yet undeveloped roll of film still sitting inside it, and also because i needed to use it to document a new project.
the new project i'll put up (much) later, the pictures on the film i'll discuss now.
the pictures in question were taken about a year ago, almost two now, on a trip to seattle my first trip to seattle in fact, which amusingly enough was a side trip during my first trip to vancouver*.
the trip was a brainchild of craig and his friend (whose name i can't remember), dave probably had some say in the decision process as well, as for myself however i was just along for the ride.

the trip down was itself was rather uneventful, american customs officers always used to just wave you right through, canadian customs, of course, is a whole different ball game. we stopped somewhere uninteresting and got our money exchanged (i went down with what i thought was a decent amount of cash and came back with not a cent). at the uninteresting place was a gas station store that had a lot of hunting stuff and junk food - go figure. they had toques ("knit caps" in american) for one dollar. pretty impressive for such an unimpressive place. i did not buy one however.
the next event that i remember was the bleak grey skyline of seattle looming on the horizon, a mass of intertwining grey roads, grey cement buildings and even greyer skies. that and the pointy space needle, which we never saw up close.
don't let my story put you off going to seattle however there are a few good things to experience there.
the first thing that happened was we drove into some part of downtown and found a place to park. once that task was accomplished our adventure had begun. the harbour front was our first destination, craig's idea again, there are some pretty neat markets along the water. don't use the public washrooms there though- sketchy (not the facilities themselves, the people in them). after that things become somewhat muddled, i do know that we had lunch at a mexican restaurant, this i'm sure was a decision strongly influenced by me. the food there was pretty impressive, it was kind of hard to order because none of us spoke spanish, i did managed to end up with a burrito the size of my fore arm though so everything turned out well. that and to top things off i discovered a rather impressive brand of root beer that most likely wouldn't pass canadian food safety restrictions. after lunch dave and myself ended up in a really cool rock/punk record shop craig and the other quarter of our party ended up trying on skirts or something. the plan was we were to meet back at the tour of seattle's underground, dave and i just barely made it back in time for the tour. the underground tour ranks as one thing that you should not miss if you visit seattle the complexities of the tour experience would take too long to get into so i'll just give you the lowdown: seattle was built around its sewer system.
the tour and some rapping guy who was making up rhymes as he walked along beside us and then went to "see the ladies" and my lunch were all worth while enough to put up of the greyness of seattle for one day; nevertheless i was glad to return to vancouver at the end of the day.
i was not so glad however about certain events which took place during the course of the return trip.

canadian customs agaents are evil. granted dave does look like a member of the hell's angels, that fact aside though, they have no sense of humour, compassion or any other trait resembling a decent human emotion. maybe they're robots.
needless to say our car was stopped at customs, we were asked to vacate the car and then were unpromptly questioned and had a drug dog go through our car. the pinnacle of the whole experience was the point at which the customs officials began laughing at me for only having thirty dollars worth of canadian tire money in my wallet. i guess they do have a sense of humour after all.

luckily after standing around for a while, looking dumb, we were released and spent the rest of the car ride home without incident.

* i've already written about the damn vancouver trip, if you haven't read about it yet check out the rest of the news section.