I recently took a trip to Seattle, Washington. To most people, that seems like an unlikely and completely random place to take a vacation, especially in October. And well, they are correct, it was completely random and it made it that much better. I meant to write about my trip immediately after returning back home, but some douche who sat next to me on the airplane would not stop sneezing, and by some chance I ended up with the flu, go figure.The first thing I want to talk about though is airports and airplanes. To sum it up simply, they are just awful. I had to do the full body scan, which I desperately wanted to see, just to see if my body looks flattering in a 3d x-ray. After the scan, they then said they detected something on my foot leading to what I refer to as ‘a taxpayer subsidized foot rub’ from a gentlemen in blue latex gloves. Sidenote: I thought of making the foot rub joke right there on the spot, but was wise enough to hold my tongue, because I didn’t want to get strip searched. Not because I’m afraid of strip searches, but because I would probably miss my flight.
My siblings and friends who have flown in the past have told me about how they usually make friends with the person they sit next to on the plane. Not in my case. I had a woman cram her two obnoxious children next to me while she tried to order as much booze as legally possible from the drink cart. And that was just the first of four flights I took. After a brief connection in Denver, on the way to Seattle I had to sit next to a guy who said the word ‘Yeah, bro’ way too much and said his life’s motto was ‘Everything works out, just not always the way you want it to’, to which I wanted to tell him my motto was ‘Don’t share your life’s motto with strangers’. But in adherence to my motto, I didn’t.
And having four flights with the same airline, I had the same cookie four times, and each time it was just a little bit more disgusting. On the return flight home, the first ‘neighbor’ I had was the aforementioned sneezer, a man from Georgia who enjoyed talking about football and….you guessed it, sneezing on people. Every time he sneezed, I could feel it on my arm, and being in the window seat I felt like I was in a dark corner being preyed on by some sinus predator. After getting off that flight, I slept nearly all the way back to Michigan, seated next to a nearly sober man in very short shorts and a very long ponytail.
I took extensive notes the entire time I was in the city in hopes of being able to write about it when I got home. When I emptied my briefcase out, it was a mess of yellow legal pads, small scraps of papers from my hotel room, anarchists newsletters (which will be explained later), endless receipts, pamphlets, brochures, tickets, and a piece of hotel stationary that I used to jot down quick ideas before I forgot them. I’m glad I did write things down, because looking over this stuff, I had forgotten about some of it already. One of the notes just simply says:
A newly departed vegetarian at the pizza place.
I was in a pizza shop and I witnessed a man come in and buy a pepperoni pizza and then say that he had been a vegetarian for ten years and decided to quit that very day. All I kept thinking was ‘Ten years without meat and you’re first day back you’re going right into greasy pepperoni?….you are going to get sick.’ That’s like saying you haven’t had a drink in ten years and then smoking crack.
There are lots of vegetarians in Seattle, and almost every restaurant I went into had a vegetarian menu. Being a beef loving mid-westerner, I found this most bizarre. I had been raised to believe that salad was an appetizer, something to hold you over while they rotated an animal over an open flame. Of course, I have nothing against vegetarians, but they sure are missing out on some deliciousness.
My first day in Seattle, I actually found out that I forgot to pack a belt. I purposely did not wear a belt so I could get through security quicker, but with my slim waist and abnormally curved back, all my pants constantly sag. Funfact: There is no place in downtown Seattle that you can buy a belt at 7:30 in the morning. I must’ve walked every block of downtown, holding onto my pants so they wouldn’t fall down, trying to find any place that I could get a belt. I couldn’t get a belt, but I definitely could get coffee. They never seem to close the coffee houses in Seattle, everything else closes, but you can get coffee anytime of day. Naturally, I end up drinking lots of coffee. So here I am, a stranger in a big city, jazzed up on coffee, and my pants are falling off my ass and there’s nothing I can do about it. I must’ve looked insane. I asked the desk clerk at my hotel where I could find a belt because I had stupidly forgot to pack one. The only place he could recommend was Nordstroms. I needed an emergency belt, I was thinking something like five-ten dollars, and I most certainly was not going to find it there. In typical Midwestern fashion, where do you think I ended up finding my belt? The drugstore!!!! They have a chain of drugstores that carry literally everything, for a second I thought I was in an ACO Hardware. Five bucks, got a belt, fit perfectly.
After that small hiccup, things started to go much better for me, and I started to walk around the city. I got lost instantly.
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