Marcel's Blog

Hello fellow cosmicadventurers! Some of you may be wondering if we have moved on to another dimension, but fear not! We are alive and well in the Emerald City. Just about every weekend Charlotte and I are out and about getting to know another area of town. Seattle is so unique in that each neighborhood or surrounding city has its own culture, style, and charm. You can’t really say Seattle is like this or that because there is so much variety. I guess you could describe the city overall as eclectic. It’s bursting at the seams with culture which is one of the main reasons we moved here. Pretty much every weekend there are multiple cultural festivals, sporting events, and farmers markets going on around the different neighborhoods of Seattle. For example next weekend we plan to go to the Filipino festival, unless of course I can somehow miraculously score a pair of Pearl Jam tickets…

Other than Seattle we’ve also been enjoying some other places in the PNW. We made a weekend trip down to Portland and another one to Vancouver BC. Portland it a great city. It kind of reminds me of Denver with the outdoorsy vibe going on. It’s a much smaller and a more compact city like you would expect to see in Europe. We noticed there are a lot more parks and people seemed to be a little less sophisticated but more friendly. We didn’t do a lot of sight seeing this time since we were really scoping it out as a possible place to live in the future if things don’t work out for us in Seattle. We did find one super-cool bookstore downtown called Powell’s. I’m sure if you ask anyone that lives there they will tell you it is the center of the Portland Universe. It pretty much takes up a whole downtown city block and several stories; they even give you a map to find your way around.

We went to Vancouver BC six years ago when we visited the PNW but forgot how cool it is. Its really a mix between Hong Kong and London. The buildings are designed just like Hong Kong and about half of the people are Asian so you feel like you are in Hong Kong, but the neighborhoods are reminiscent of London. On this trip we pretty much stuck to exploring all the downtown areas such as Yaletown, Chinatown, Gastown, English Bay, West End and Stanley Park. Near English Bay we found a French Canadian restaurant that served Poutine which is thick cut French Fries with hot brown gravy and cheese curds on top, MMM. I just can’t say enough good things about Vancouver! If it were easier to get a Canadian citizenship and make a living in Vancouver we’d be there for sure, but I guess we’ll have to settle for being a few hours drive away. We haven’t been back to Victoria since we moved here but plan to go sometime this summer, it’s as classy as Vancouver is contemporary. We have been to Whidbey island but not the San Juan islands yet, and of course there is also the Olympic Peninsula, Cascade NP, and Alaska…so much to see, so much to do.

Besides sightseeing we’ve been doing some other activities as well. Back in May we went to the very cool Varekai Cirque De Soleil that was surprisingly set up at Marymoor park in Redmond. Redmond is also the self proclaimed biking capital of the NW so Charlotte usually tries to get out on the Sammamish river trail every day after work. It’s just down the street and a very relaxing trail that leads to many other lake, river and city trails. Charlotte introduced me to one of her coworkers who is also a Colorado transplant. He took me out fly fishing on the Yakima river where I caught my first fish in WA and it was actually on my fly rod which was another first. Charlotte and I tried salmon fishing off the Edmonds pier one day but didn’t have much luck, we’ll have to give that another try sometime. Last week my sister Tara and her boyfriend Hugh visited us for a few days. We had a great time visiting the Pikes Market, Mt Rainier, Kirkland waterfront, and other stuff around. We even cooked up some Dungeness crab and local veggies from the Pikes market place that is famous for throwing fish, wow was that good!

Tara and Hugh really seemed to really like it here which was very encouraging to us because despite all the cool things we have done in this area sometimes we do miss our friends back in the Colorado Rockies and wonder if we did the right thing by moving out here. I guess I always wanted to move out to the west coast since I was a teenager and we both wanted to live in a place that has more culture, water, and opportunities. The difficulties we are encountering with our new home are mainly real estate prices, finding good stable jobs, and of course meeting more friends. Seattleites aren’t always the easiest people to get to know, especially on the “eastside” which is full of white collar techie types. If you don’t know what the eastside is just look at a metropolitan map of Seattle and you’ll see a huge body of water called Lake Washington that separates Seattle from Bellevue, Redmond, Kirkland and the other eastside communities that are often thought of as the burbs by the much trendier blue collar Seattleites.

Unfortunately these burbs we are living in are full of overqualified and overeducated people all competing for the same jobs I’m trying to get. I’ve applied for over 50 jobs in the last few months resulting in several email responses, phone screens, and interviews but no new job. I’m still making good money delivering pizza to all of Charlotte’s coworkers at Microsoft but that isn’t exactly the career move I had hoped for when we moved here. Nevertheless I’m trying to stay positive and remember that we are financially as well off as we were in Denver and eventually something has to come through if I keep trying. A drastic career change may be in order though. If you have ever read the book “who moved my cheese” you know what I mean when I say I am actively seeking some new cheese. If you haven’t read the book I highly recommend it. You can read it in one day and it will give you a new outlook on how to accept change. For me I might change to a career outside of the tech field if that is where I find some good opportunities (cheese). Don’t worry I’m not going to rob a bank or cheese market, but I am exploring other career directions I can go into while I go back to school and finish a BA.

With all the effort I’ve put forth in looking for a full time job I haven’t had much time to do website stuff, as I’m sure you’ve noticed if you’ve been looking for updates or noticed that the header and footer is not functioning properly on some pages (soon to be fixed). I do try to list any major updates, especially new html pages, in the recent updates menu on the home page so check there first. I have a couple new photo galleries from Athens ready to upload in the next week or so and hopefully the rest of the Greece pictures will follow. After that I’ll add some pics from the U.S. portion of our trip. I’ve taken lots of pictures out here but there are mainly with the point and shoot camera since our DSLR has been in the shop getting repaired from a defect that started right after our Eurotrip. The repair is taking months so I’ve actually been putting off going to some nice places like the Olympic peninsula until I get it back; hopefully that will be soon. Meanwhile I’ll keep shooting what I can with the S70 canon and maybe come up with some sort of good variety of pictures for a Pacific Northwest Gallery by the fall.

To end things I’ll make my usual soapbox, or I guess in my case pizza box spiel. I’ve been watching the weather channel lately and WOW is global warming hitting us hard or what! Isn’t it obvious by now? The first half of 2006 was the hottest Jan-June on record ever. I personally think that in the next decade or so we will have hurricanes category 1-6 instead of 1-5. With 6 being a new category strength for the newer stronger storms that were previously thought impossible. I mean think about it, we have been recording these things for only what, 200 years or so? Who’s to say there couldn’t be a storm the size of the Alaska to hit us and it might even hit us in the Northeast or West Coast. Anyway those are just my wild predictions. We saw the real raw data on the Al Gore movie “Inconvienent Truth” and before you laugh let me just quote my old buddy Nayeem and say “that’s not a matter of joke”. The human race is about to get BBQ’ed from all this global warming. Not to rub it in or anything but I’m glad we are in the coolest part of the country. The highest recorded temperature ever in Redmond is 96 degrees which must have been a catastrophic heat wave because for the last week we’ve only been getting up to about 70. At the rate things are going in the rest of the country I’m sure we’ll get a chance to break that 1994 record soon. At least people around here have the right idea to fight the global warming. Seems the most popular car in Redmond is the funny looking Toyota Prius. It kind of looks like a space mobile but considering it gets about 60 miles to the gallon we are planning on trading in the rarely driven jeep for either that or some other kind of hybrid or smart car in the near future. Recycling, conservation, biodegradable cleaners and other environmentally friendly products are all things we and others out here are doing to try and save our world. The question is will it be enough and do enough people even care to make a difference? Only if Americans (who are the biggest polluters in the world) lead the change. We can do it!

Us at Deception Pass on Whidbey Island. We hope it still looks this beautiful for the next generation.