Our first day in Seattle 
today and we managed to cram a lot in (and I’m not just talking about the complimentary breakfast).
This morning started with a trip to the Seattle Center , a park and arts centre built for the 1962 “Century 21 Exposition”, which is home to the Space Needle 
(which we have’t been up yet, we’re saving it).
It’s also home to the EMP, “Experience Music Project” 
which, strangely, is both a music museum and a science fiction museum in one. The music section is home to exhibits about Seattle’s most famous exports (except maybe Microsoft), Nirvana and Jimi Hendrix and the science fiction museum is currently holding an interactive exhibit about Avatar. Strange combination but it kind of worked. The music lab also contained a lot of interactive exhibits and mini recording studios. I tried to teach Jen how to play the guitar but it wasn’t really working, not least because I don’t really know how to play the guitar.
Anyway, we then walked down to Seattle’s famous Pike Place Market , an indoor and outdoor farmers market since 1907. Alongside the fish and flower markets there’s an awful lot of tourist tat shops. It was interesting but we didn’t stay long.
In the afternoon we’d booked ourself onto the “Seattle Subculture Tour” , a bus tour taking in all the important “alternative” sites in Seattle. It was a really fun tour, although it wasn’t exactly on brief. It was pretty much a standard tour of the main sights in Seattle but there were only 4 of us booked on the bus so we pretty much got a personal tour with the guide. The tour stopped at Kurt Cobain’s house as well as “Kurt’s Bench” which has become a shrine to him over the years. We also got to hop off the bus and get some great views of Lake Washington, Bill Gate’s house (from a long way away!), Chinatown and Mount Ranier , which dominates the skyline wherever you are in Seattle, but looks great over the lake.
By the way, for any fans of Soundgarden out there, the monument Jen is leaning against in the photo is called the “Black Hole Sun”, which has a fairly famous song named after it .