The "Emerald City": Seattle

Day 1: We arrived at Seattle after a short 3 1/4-hour flight from Anchorage and were picked up by Natalie from Seattle Tourism at Sea-Tac Airport by limo-service. Our first stop was at Pike Place Market, a great market area, mostly covered, in different buildings, at Seattle's waterfront. The market is Seattle's epicenter of fresh produce, specialty foods and more than 200 independent businesses. It was established in 1907 to connect citizens and farmers and still is a year-round farmers market, with owner-operated bakeries, fish markets, a brewery, butcher shops, produce stands and specialty food stores. There are a lot of restaurants - like Lowell's, where we had a great breakfast on Sunday.



During a two-hour market tour with "Savor Seattle Food Tours" we not only got enough to eat - cheeses, donuts, yoghurt, clam chowder, crab cakes, smoked salmon etc. - but, also, learned a lot about the market itself, about the different vendors, its history etc. It started to rain during our walk in the market area, but temps were in the lower 50ies.


After check-in into the hip Kimpton Group's Palladion Hotel in downtown at 5 pm – a new boutique hotel in a building from 1910 – our little Go West post fam tour group of only five - two Chinese tour operators, Charly from Great Britain and us - met again for a drive to dinner at Salty's at Alki Beach with a fantastic view towards Seattle's night skyline (see pic). Of course, we had seafood: king salmon, differently served, and as appetizers for the table we got a "seafood tower", including oysters, shrimps, sushi and dungeness crab.

What a difference to Anchorage: loud, construction everywhere, heavy traffic. The Greater Seattle Area has a population of roughly 3.8 mio. people, Seattle itself about 700.000, and it is one of the nation's fastest-growing cities and tech markets. It's a yuppie place and construction is going on everywhere. Amazon is just building its new downtown campus, consisting of several new buildings, Expedia and Northstar are moving to downtown and it's getting crazy and expensive. Traffic is horrible and prices are sky-rocketing, not only in real estate, but, also, in restaurants. The culinary scene is very creative and absolutely stunning, but, restaurants are very expensive, too. I would say, prices are equal to New York in the meantime. Social contrasts are growing, too: lots of homeless people on the streets.