Food!

Friday 16 July

Fish at the Pike Street Market

After a lazy morning we headed to the annual Bite of Seattle festival, which is a big food festival that takes place at the Seattle Center. This is an area that hosted the world's fair in 1962 and is the cultural heart of the city. We wandered around the various stalls selling food from anywhere you could think of (and a few places you couldn't think of) and took in a cookery demonstration and some wine tasting - sadly they weren't offering Washingtonian wine so we had to put up with Californian. Tough, but someone had to do it. Lunch was at the part of the festival called "The Alley" where for $10 they served little samples of dishes from seven of the top restaurant in the city. Mmm!

Pike Street Market, Seattle

We then took the monorail to the Westlake Shopping Mall and wandered down to Pike Street Market which is on the waterfront. Here are stalls selling fresh fish, fruit and veg, flowers and all sorts of other delights. One piece of entertainment consists of the guys on the big fish counter throwing big salmons across to each other. Across the street from the market is the original Starbucks shop - very unassuming and hard to imagine that such a massive worldwide enterprise started there.

The original Starbucks, Seattle

After coffee at another Starbucks (the original being ludicrously busy) we headed back to Lake Stevens through the Friday evening traffic and lounged around watching Who Wants to be a Millionaire? before heading out for dinner at "Mi Tierra", a Mexican restaurant in Monroe. Jeanna was determined for me to have good Mexican food, and my burrito certainly didn't disappoint!

Back home for an episode of Bones and then to bed. Hard to believe my stay in Washington State is over!