The Pacific Northwest

We made it to the final stop of Marty on the map! We've had a dramatic switch up in energy from my first 7 weeks in Asia, and locked into the American life. I flew out to Seattle from Seoul to link up with Liz, Lawrence and Anna (friends I work with) for a tour of the PNW before our work offsite. Seattle -> Friday Harbor -> Port Angeles. I've decided that the state of Washington has a certain wizard energy to it. Buckle UP.

Americanisms

Rocking up in America after 6 weeks of Asia has been a mad culture shock. It took me quite a while to ignore my Korean instinct to say Gamsahamnidaaaaa every time I got out of a taxi.

I've been to America before, but this was definitely the first time I've explored more small town proper American shit and it was really specific energy. I've never felt so British, I feel like I was talking like an Oliver Twist street urchin. Alrite guvnor.

American things that stuck out to me:

1. Everything is so vast
   • It's really like a scale I have never seen before. The nature is so BIG and wide and you could keep driving and it would keep going forever. The trees are huge, the mountains are bigger.
   • The cars are freakishly big, I am shorter than the dashboard on most of them which is a little terrifying. People literally drive monster trucks around the streets of seattle
   • The portions are obviously massive, but being confronted by it is wild. If you try to go less hard and order an omlette for breakfast, it comes with hashbrowns and 6 pieces of toast as standard.

2. You can consume shit everywhere - It's kind of wild how possible it is to just eat and drink relentlessly. - You can't go like 3 minutes without a drive thru, there are tiny coffee huts everywhere where the coffees are like the size of my head as a minimum. There's also many bikini coffee huts that are exactly the same, but your barista wears a bikini, obviously. - The supermarkets are unfathomably massive for tiny towns, and have like a zillion flavours of pringle and 20 types of jello. - Any bar you are in has 5 screens all playing different things that you can see from where you're sitting. You gotta work hard to concentrate on your friends.

Seattle

We began with a few days meandering around Seattle, it's just a nice chill vibey city.

We hit Washington on what felt like the first sunny week of the year, and everyone there was going absolutely feral over the weather. That similar energy London gets where everyone is out in the park with a pint until 11pm even though its not even warm because you're just too excited that you might be on your way to summer. Very blissful vibes to wander around parks, farmers markets and the bay.

Going on holiday with Software Engineers is a specific energy. I guess Seattle welcomes that shit, because at least 1 in 40 people that live there work at Amazon. Within about 2 hours of landing, Lawrence had asked Claude to categorise every Seattle neighbourhood as if it was an area of London, and we were studying the output like it was a treasure map. For your mental geography, we were staying in Capitol Hill (apparently a mix between Soho and Dalston - slay).

Our favourite Seattle items:

1. Halloween Houses
   • All of the streets near our spot were filled with such CUTE americana houses. Like horizontal wooden panelling, the dreamy porch setup where you have a rocking chair and shout at people, and brew your witch potions out the back.

2. Millenial Aura
   • The energy of Seattle felt so millenial but not in a derogatory way (surprising I know), more like the entire town felt like going back in time to 2010 in an extremely nostalgic and vibey way.
   • The bars, the music, the clothes - it felt like being in a movie (Twilight movie 1??) where being faintly hipster in a kinda outdoorsy way was actually cool and not yet a meme. How comforting.
3. American pastimes
   • We spent our evenings in Seattle at the local pool bar and bowling alley. It's like sticky floor energy with lots of dudes trying to impress their dates.
   • Ended up bowling so many times in a row that none of us could use our forearms for the next 2 days. Also learnt that I suck at bowling.

Friday Harbor

Our next stop was a lil tiny town called Friday Harbor on the island of San Juan - part of a little group of islands west of Seattle, protected from the Pacific by Vancouver island and the Olympic Peninsula.

One of my most favourite things about Washington has been the vibes on the ferries that navigate the different peninsulas. Every ferry will have bench seats in a classic ferry vibe, but about 1/3 of them will have a puzzle on the table, in various states of completion, that you'll just rock up and do a few pieces on for your 20 minute journey. It's really satisfying contributing to a thing where you never saw the people before you, and you'll never see it finished, but someone else will. Liz described them as feeling like the happy version of purgatory which is literally so true, I could stay there doing jigsaws in a brightly lit room with the sea out the window for the rest of eternity.

So, Friday harbour itself - picture a kinda nautical islandy tiny town where everyone thinks you're weird but in a welcoming way. Main thing we were here for was nature, so we headed out on a whale watch boat into the Salish Sea to see what we could find.

Ended up having the most wildly lucky trip where we ran into a family of 9 orcas in Canadian waters near Vancouver Island and watched them for the next hour as they swam around our boat. Truly the most mentally cool experience, my top 3 orca items:

1. Sea lion hunting
   • The entire family collabed on an insane sea lion hunt for about 30 mins, they were doing whole body jumps and spins out the water, I would not wanna be the sea lion
   • Once the sea lion is captured the adults take it down to the bottom of the sea to eat it up, so all the little baby orcas play and spin about at the top of the ocean because they don't eat meat yet, it was so cool

2. Grandma matriach orca
   • So the grandma of the family is literally a legendary whale, she was born in 1988 and she's called Raksha. She's one of the first whales they recorded to have 8 babies, and she just had one literally in March that she was swimming around with.
   • She was captured in the 90s for sea world just before it was made illegal to capture whales, and then this dude campaigned to release her, she got put back into the sea, hid in Alaska for a while, then rocked up back near vancouver island and started an entire generation of whales
3. Whale singing
   • The boat captain had an underwater microphone that he put down, and after they'd finished hunting the whales were non stop singing. It was wildly ethereal beautiful stuff.

The boat guys were all buzzing about the whale singing and the hunt, like it was the best whale singing they'd ever heard out there.

Also drove past 2 bald eagles swooping about, a big herd of sheep from Cyprus, massive stellar sea lions (they can weigh 1 ton???), lil harbour seals, cormorants and my favourite the pigeon guillemot. They have really round bodies and they have to flap their wings sooo fast to stay above the water they don't quite have the elegance of all the other animals round here.

Other highlights of Friday Harbor were: the butteriest microwave popcorn ever, bbqing at the lodge, playing a lot of yahtzee.

Port Angeles

Our final stop was picked to combine the Twilight universe and the beautiful Olympic Peninsula, a match made in heaven. If you're reading this and you're unfamiliar with Stephenie Meyer's work (firstly, sort it out), but it's an incredibly silly and nostalgic book series that teenage girls loved in like 2008.

We headed up to Hurricaine Ridge on our first day which is some of the wildest views I've seen from a road. We stopped every 100m to get out, look at the views, and howl at the moon.

Agenda was mostly roadtripping with the wind in our hair and the speaker blasting to various locations from the series. The town of Forks, which has approx 1 grocery store and 4 twilight merch shops.

La Push beach which has insane waves and potential werewolves. The Hoh rainforest which is one of the greenest places I have ever been where all the trees are entirely covered in moss.

Port Angeles itself had mad small town funny vibes. Really made me realise how different America is when you're not just visiting the big cities. Highlights:

• Masonic bingo rejection

  • Attempted to find a Friday night activity, saw a sign for the bingo. Rocked up, and quickly learnt that it was a masonic lodge. Briefly debated whether being three confused British people would get us in on novelty value alone, decided against it after an entire room of people stared at us in a mildly threatening way. Tactical retreat. Energy was more funny and terrifying having just visited the dispensary and had a gummy. Did not learn the secret handshake.

• Dive bar DJing

  • Quickly pivoted to a night that ended in the local divebar, where Lawrence got told he should throw darts underhand, and an old guy kept telling me that British girls have amazing smiles. Hid by the jukebox with Liz using up all our $1 bills, and ended up getting an entire room of previously bored looking dudes dancing to Cascada's every time we touch.

• Goodwill tees

  • Our final classic american pastime was visitng the local Goodwill (a charity shop) to grab some sweet american items. The rails were literally filled with eagles and freedom shirts, but Liz got some amazing tie die in a truly gross way, and an iconic Shrek item. I bought what I thought was a funny tshirt with a Pony on, later found out it was Parks and Rec merch which was highly disappointing.

Over and out

Final stop of the sabbatical complete! I just spent the week near Seattle at my company offsite. Simultaneously nice to not go straight into real work, and wild to see 150 people all at once. The 2 water sildes at the pool helped soothe the no longer holiday energy.

Now I'm back in London! It feels really vibes to be back home enjoying the sun and the Peckham vibes. I almost missed being run over by lime bikes and hearing the local foxes scream.

You can look forward to one final wrap up blog about my vibes before I put down Marty on the map!