Labor Day, Seattle Style: Part 2

Ok, let's hope Blogger likes me again.

Saturday continued
After the Japanese garden, we headed off to the Seattle Space Needle.  We didn't really spend much time there, for a number of reasons.  (Big huge paid-admission-required art/music festival at the bottom, lots of people, $20 to go to the top of the needle, you know.)  But, we saw it and went into the gift shop.  That counts, right?   

After the hubbub down there, we headed off to find some grub.  Using Sarah's phone, we found a cafe nearby that was supposedly cheap and friendly.  Being the innocent child I am, I took the description of "atmosphere: offbeat" as "atmosphere: quirky and fun."  Yeah, turns out it actually meant "dark, smoky, and lots of neon beer signs in the windows."  So, we bypassed that lovely little gem, as well as a few really expensive-looking restaurants, and ended up at Zeeks pizza.  Mmm...Zeeks.  

Waiting for our waiter to return...

Chop salad

Frog Belly Green pizza

One nearly-exploding (with goodness) stomach later, we walked all the way back to our car (which we had to pay $15 to park, by the way.  Thank you Seattle...), we found out that the glass-blowing studio we wanted to go to (which was FREE) was back by Zeeks.  I was really not feeling up to either searching for a parking spot on the street or walking back over there, so we just went back to the hotel.  Thankfully, we were moved to a different smoking room that was almost in the non-smoking section and the staff had put in non-smoking bedding.  For causing them so much grief, they really did try to take care of us.  Of course, room #3 didn't have a refrigerator or a microwave, but hey, at least it didn't make me want to puke.  I'll take what I can get.


Oh yeah, I almost forgot--once in room #3, Sarah realized that she didn't have the wall charger for her phone in our stuff and that it was most likely in room #2.  I went back to the lobby to see if they had found it: no dice.  Because of this, we were trying to save her phone battery (our link to the world wide web) and had no choice but to use the computer in the lobby.  (Really, I think the staff was sick of us.  It seemed like we complained a lot.  They definitely knew what room number we were in without us having to tell them.)  After some research, we found a $3 movie theater not too far away.  Hello Saturday night activity!

Thanks for the picture Disney!

The only problem: we weren't hungry enough for dinner before the movie but knew we would be by the middle.  Solution: popcorn, of course.  But, sadly, a small popcorn at this cheap theater cost....$6.  So, in essence, we paid $6 a piece for the movie, instead of $3.  Lame.  But at least the movie was decent.  (I'm a fan of Jay Baruchel--I think he's funny.)


Sunday
Sarah wanted to go to 9:00 church.  Ugh.  But, being the good sister I am, I got up super early and was ready to go on time.  We just happened to go to the same ward that my cousin is serving his mission in...

Don't mind the fact that 2 of the 3 people in this picture are blinking.

The look on his face when we walked in was priceless.  The ward was really friendly and people really tried to help us feel welcome.  Yay for The Church!  I even got to fulfill my calling a few states away and played in Relief Society.  (One of the sisters in the presidency asked if I could stay forever.  Haha.  She was cute.)  After church, we hopped back aboard George and went to: 

If you look really closely, you can see us at the bottom.  The temple was quite large.

It was really pretty.  They had flowers and stuff, but the sheer amount of green there (and the cloudy skies) was beautiful for a desert rat like me.  Like this:

This is what I called the backyard of the temple.  Just a nice little forest, sitting there minding its own business.  Seriously?  A forest?  And it was on all sides, not just in the back.  How cool is that?!

After dinner (it felt so weird to be going to an Applebee's on a Sunday...), we headed back to the hotel because we were feeling tired.  I think the plan was to take a nap.  Did we take a nap, though?  No.  We looked up a few scriptures our mom suggested to us (gotta love that momma), did some word searches together (aww, sisterly love), and...sat there.  For FIVE hours!  We did turn the TV on, but our best choice was "Facing the Giants."  Now, don't get offended.  There's nothing wrong with that movie.  Heck, it was even Sunday appropriate, in my book.  But, it's pretty heavy on the cheese.  And when you've already been stuck in a very small hotel room for 3 hours, it doesn't quite cut it.


Why didn't we go explore a little, you ask?  Well, as I mentioned before, I think we planned on the nap thing.  But, when that didn't happen, we couldn't really think of anyplace free and Sunday-like that we wanted to go.  And, to be honest, we were a little sick of getting lost and missing turns.  Seriously, the state of Washington needs to rethink it's highway and road system.  I have never seen so many retarded forked roads in my life!  And the street signs were tiny!  Look at this:

This is what we had to deal with.  When you don't really know where you're going in the first place, this does not help.


We tried a visit to the ice machine to relieve the boredom, but sadly, we were foiled.

Don't I look sad?  The sign says the machine is broken and you have to go to the front desk to get some ice.  Yeah right!  Those people were sick enough of us as it was.  No use pushing it.

So, we resorted to taking pictures of each other.  As you can probably guess, none of them are very flattering.  I'll spare you the horror.


Monday
We decided to dedicate all of our available time on Monday to Pike's Place Market.  That place was crazy!  There were shops and stalls everywhere.  Oh yeah, and tons of people.  There were 3 levels to the marketplace, too.  We started out mostly wandering, but when I tried a sample of this I was such a sucker I had to buy it:

It probably helped that the guy giving me the sample was fun to talk to.  I should have gotten a picture with him.  Another guy that we should have gotten a picture of is our good friend David.  He was the shopkeeper in a little bookshop on the second-ish level of the market (it gets a little confusing down there).  When a new customer came in, he would say hi, ask where they were from, and then sing out "Oh, you came all the way from [location] to see me!  You're a bookstore groupie!"  Yeah, he was pretty much my favorite part of the market.  The shop was fun, too--new books next to old, tatty ones and everything kind-of stuck on the shelves haphazardly (I mean there were sections and all, but they weren't in neat little stacks).  Normally that would drive me nuts, but it worked there.  We bought something from him, too, but after we had wandered through the rest of the market trying to find cheaper playing cards to no avail.  (After Sunday's boredom, we wanted to be prepared for a long wait at the airport.)  That's ok--I'd like to think the $6 we played for a deck of (European) playing cards was like a little tip to David for being cool.


Some other highlights of Pike's: 
1) We saw our cousin and his companion again.  When we caught his attention, he said "You guys are everywhere!  What are you doing?"  Haha.  After assuring him that we were not stalking him ("No, really, we're not."), we went off to see other things. 

2) Me and Rachel, the pig of Pike's Place.

3) Our lunch.  

Rachel's All-American Sandwich.  Pretty much awesome.  Do you see the bacon on that thing?  Mmm...bacon.

We saw a ton of people eating this stuff and decided that we might as well jump on the bandwagon.  Holy cow, it was good, but I could almost hear my arteries screaming in protest.  So...much...cheese...

4) The bathrooms.  This may sound weird, but they were funny.  Here's how you know you're in the women's bathroom.

For obvious reasons, I didn't get a picture of the big XY marking the men's bathroom.


After Pike's, we headed off to return our car (goodbye George!  You served us well!) and get down to the airport.  It was probably a good thing we got there nearly 2 1/2 hours early because Sarah's ticket somehow got cancelled, a fact we learned when she couldn't check in to the flight.  Thank goodness they got it fixed pretty quickly and we were on the same flight home.  (At first, the lady said, "Now, I couldn't get you two together because the flight is pretty full..." and we interrupted with "Wait, so we're not on the same flight?!"  Turns out she just meant we weren't sitting together, but we would be on the same plane.  Phew.)


And so, we made it home alive!  (If any of you are still reading this absurdly long post, you deserve a candy bar.  Don't worry, I can wait while you go find one.)  Despite the problems we had and the fact that I'm not very good with spontaneous changes of plans, I'm glad I got to go.  Amazingly, except for a few minutes near the very end, we really got along well.  Who'd'a thunk: my sister and I can survive in close quarters for 4 days without killing each other!  Haha, j/k.  It was an amazing experience, though.  Thanks for the ticket parents!  And thanks for taking me Sarah!  Mom was right: this one is definitely going down in the family lore.

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