For my next two days in Seattle, I had a few places I wanted to check out, and a lot more time than I realized to visit them.

Monday, August 15, 2022

The day's first destination was going to be the famous Museum of Pop Culture, also known as MoPOP. I'd been there once before, during my first trip to Seattle back in 2015, but like any good museum, it has been updated since then. To get there, I was going to ride the Seattle Monorail. The south end of the Monorail is at Westlake Station, at 5th and Pine, which is a short walk from the Green Tortoise Hostel. Seattle Coffee Works is conveniently on the way.

The monorail runs between Westlake Station and Seattle Center to the north. Seattle Center is a huge complex that includes MoPOP, the Chihuly Garden, and the Space Needle. During this trip I didn't visit the Space Needle or the Chihuly Garden; I already took care of both of those back in 2015 when I first saw MoPOP.

Since MoPOP didn't open until ten, I was too early so I walked a few blocks north to Café Hagen for another coffee. Like any other coffee house in this city, it gets my recommendation.

So, finally, at 10 MoPOP was open.

This wasn't there last time I was here: this memorial statue of the late Chris Cornell.

MoPOP started out in 2000 under a different name, Experience Music Project. While originally it was only dedicated to music, as that name suggests, it expanded to cover many other facets of pop culture, leading to its rebranding as the Museum of Pop Culture in 2016. There are different wings within, each with its own theme. One is entirely dedicated to horror films; I went through that one back in 2015 but skipped over it this time. And then there's the sci-fi area...

It's full of costumes, props, and such from several decades worth of sci-fi movies and TV series. Every one of these naturally has a plaque next to it describing the fantasy world it came from, and we should take a closer look at one...

This is next to an exhibit about the X-Men. But what's interesting here is the "alien" text in the top right and top left. All of the plaques in this part of the museum have a few words like this. There's a sign elsewhere with a transliteration key on it. According to that, the word in the top left is "Earth" while the top right says "Oh my stars and garters."

This one's from Galaxy Quest. Ever see that one? Hilarious sci-fi spoof, mostly skewering Star Trek. The alien text on this plaque says "Historical documents." Like the alien words on all the other plaques, it's a reference that you'd have to see the movie to get.

Right next to the sci-fi section you'll find a hall devoted to fantasy, containing costumes and props from such films as Lord of the Rings, The Princess Bride, The Wizard of Oz, Highlander, Harry Potter, and Labyrinth, What was interesting here was how they've come up with all these fantasy character archetypes. Whenever you find any costume or prop pertaining to a certain character, on the accompanying plaque there will be a card depicting what archetype that character fits into.

• The Unlikely Hero - Westley from Princess Bride, Frodo Baggins from Lord of the Rings, Dorothy from Wizard of Oz
• The Rogue - Sirius Black from Harry Potter, Inigo Montoya from Princess Bride
  
• The Damsel - Buttercup from Princess Bride
• The Knight - Aragorn from Lord of the Rings
• The Shadow - Gollum from Lord of the Rings, Severus Snape from Harry Potter, No-Face from Spirited Away
• The Warbringer - Gimli from Lord of the Rings
• The Companion - Cowardly Lion from Wizard of Oz, Samwise Gamgee from Lord of the Rings
• The Mythic Warrior - Connor MacLeod from Highlander
• The Trickster - Jareth from Labyrinth, Mary Poppins, Loki
• The Witch - the White Witch from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
• The Earth-Shaker - Sauron from Lord of the Rings
• The Anti-Hero
• The Hero's Muse
• The Mystic
• The Maiden Warrior
• The Fool
• The Magical Prodigy
• The Barbarian
• The Wise Wizard
• The Iron Woman
• And probably at least one more I didn't notice; the ones with examples I listed were only the ones that turned up in my many photos. The others I found from googling.

There's also a game you can play to find out what archetype you fit into. So of course I did it and found out I'm a Shadow.

I didn't expect this, but I think it's pretty accurate. Their description of a Shadow, when you touch the card on the screen, says "The shadow mirrors the hero, expressing qualities that the hero cannot. He may be mean-spirited, withdrawn, or deeply insecure, but can also offer balance and insight."

To give credit where it's due, and to show you better what it looked like, the interactive game was developed by Scott Thiessen.

The next museum hall I walked into was a temporary exhibit, Pearl Jam: Home and Away, which displayed a great deal of artifacts from one of Seattle's most successful rock band's many tours. Since this was a temporary exhibit, I'll share a lot more of my photos of it here because you won't be able to see this anymore if you visit the museum.

Guitar played by Mike McCready in his old band Shadow, which he had started in high school.

Posters and photos and such of Green River and Mother Love Bone, the bands that guitarist Stone Gossard and bassist Jeff Ament were in before Pearl Jam. They were in Green River in the mid '80s, and after that band broke up moved on to Mother Love Bone. And that band would've likely been the one to break the Seattle scene through to the mainstream, as they had just recorded their debut album on a major label, but singer Andrew Wood unexpectedly died of a heroin overdose days before the album's release in 1990, abruptly ending Mother Love Bone's career. The black hat seen here was Wood's.

These are mostly from the mid-'90s. The monkeys and basketball players are stage props belonging to Mike McCready and Jeff Ament, respectively. The Polaroid camera in the top left was used by Eddie Vedder to take pictures for the No Code and Lost Dogs cover artwork. In the bottom left you can see part of the setlist for the Pearl Jam/Neil Young concert at San Francisco's Golden Gate Park in 1995.

Jackets worn on stage by Eddie Vedder in the '90s, Stone Gossard's cow stage prop, the band's "Favorite New Artist, Heavy Metal/Hard Rock" American Music Award from 1993, and a bass smashed by Jeff Ament at a show in Vancouver.

Various 12" singles released between 1991 and 2018.

A bunch of hats worn by Jeff Ament over the years, and posters and shirts from the band's shows in 2004, including Vote for Change.

The bronze sculptures from the 2008 "Life Wasted" video, and the song's handwritten lyrics.

Throughout the room are these enlarged, life-size Funko Pop! figures of all the current band members. This is Matt Cameron, formerly of Soundgarden, who has been Pearl Jam's drummer since 1998, replacing the revolving door of drummers they had during the grunge heyday.

Stone Gossard

Jeff Ament

Eddie Vedder

Mike McCready

These surfboards are from the band's 1995 Australian tour.

Pearl Jam: Home and Away's last day was April 23, 2023.

In another room you can find some more pieces of Seattle rock history:

Jerry Cantrell could be seen playing this guitar in many of Alice in Chains' videos.

Nancy Wilson's Stratocaster from the late '70s.

In another interesting room you can play some newly-developed indie video games. It was pretty crowded so I only had the chance to play one of them.

And then I had to revisit somewhere I'd been seven years earlier, the place where you can play every instrument in a rock band and, if you don't already know how, get a feel for them if not actually learn.

I'd been through the guitar, bass, drums, and vocals the last time I was here, so this time I went here to learn how to operate a mixer. This console has the Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams" playing while you can adjust the volume of each the vocal track and multiple synth tracks in the song with the faders, add and adjust various effects with the AUX dials, and change the balance between left and right speakers with the PAN dials.

Finally, I'd like to mention that MoPOP has a great restaurant called Culture Kitchen, where I had a "Mopoke" bowl for lunch.

Later in the afternoon when I was finally done with MoPOP, I wanted to check out a neighborhood called Fremont. I didn't have much of a plan, but there were some things to look at which I'd seen on Atlas Obscura, and some vinyl record stores. It was much too far to walk and the light rail didn't go there, so I had to take a bus. It seems in addition to the typical numbered bus routes, Seattle's transit system also runs some express buses branded "RapidRide." It was the RapidRide E line which I rode to Fremont.

The E line goes up Aurora Avenue, which is pretty much a highway, so after stepping off the bus at the intersection with 46th Street, I walked a couple blocks west and then started my journey south on Fremont Street. There's a lot of cool stuff on this street, and plenty of people live around there too. It's the kind of place I'd like to live in, although I'll bet any of the homes in Fremont are out of my price range.

The cool stuff on Fremont Street includes record stores, and the ones I stopped in were Daybreak Records and Jive Time Records. Between the two of them I had to stop at Vita Coffee for my caffeine fix.

This stood out to me because I knew and loved this song from the classic 80s movie “License to Drive.” Unfortunately the record just skipped at every point and was impossible to listen to, so I just watched the video on YouTube. But check out what I found in the sleeve, an old Tower Records receipt from 1988! Back then this 7” single sold for $1.66. According to the Inflation Calculator, that's $4.11 in 2022 when I bought it for 49¢, and $4.28 in 2023 when I'm writing this.

Moving further south from the record stores on Fremont Street, I eventually found my way to three places I'd seen mentioned on Atlas Obscura. First, here's the Center of the Universe.

This sign has been at this point since 1991, when a group of scientists supposedly declared it the Center of the Universe after some "study" at a nearby alehouse. But the sign wasn't the only thing they left in this area...

According to an accompanying sign, the Fremont Business Association acquired this 1950s rocket which was prominently attached to a building in another neighborhood, Belltown, which was about to be demolished. Local artists refurbished and rebuilt it, and it was mounted here on June 3, 1994.

And now here's the famous Fremont Troll which has been under this bridge since 1990, when it was created by four artists whose design won a Fremont Arts Council competition. The Troll's right hand seems to be clutching a car; that's a very real Volkswagen Beetle.

I had dinner at Jai Thai, which is at Fremont and 35th. This was a nice restaurant. The dinner I ordered was called "Emerald Garlic" which was a choice of meat, though I got it with tofu instead, on vegetables with garlic sauce. I also had a dessert consisting of mango and sticky rice. The thing that stands out the most about this restaurant was not the food but the background music. At first it didn't sound familiar until I'd been sitting there for long enough to hear some of the lyrics, which were familiar. After I recognized the words of one of Madonna's '80s classics, I realized I was listening to a bunch of jazz remakes of '80s and '90s pop hits.

Tuesday, August 16, 2022

Tuesday was the least eventful day of this week, although I did find a few places worth recommending. First, I had an Americano from Le Panier on Pike Place. Then, I was off to the Westlake light rail station to buy a light rail ticket. I'd been in Seattle for over three days now and hadn't ridden the light rail anywhere. Today I finally did, and it was north to the U-District where the University of Washington-Seattle was.

The light rail train I rode north.

After stepping off the train I realized there really wasn't much anything I was interested in seeing there. I'd only done this trip because I wanted to ride the light rail somewhere. It's a great system but just doesn't connect everywhere. (yet?) But I needed a second coffee for the morning, so I found a place called Husky Grind and stopped there for it. Great coffee, but I didn’t like how you can’t put in the creamer and sweetener yourself.

From the U-District I rode another train to Capitol Hill. The only reason I stopped here was another Atlas Obscura location, Pac Man Park.

OK, here it is...it's really nothing more than a corner of pedestrian-only pavement that's been painted like a Pac-Man screen.

So that diversion in northern districts was over so I rode another light rail train south back to downtown. For lunch I went to a wonderful place known as The Pike Pub & Brewery. It's on 1st Avenue between Pike and Union.

Pike Pub has great seafood and quite a beer selection. Not only did I eat a market salad with salmon, I also got a Pike Monk’s Uncle Belgian Ale, Kilt Lifter Scottish Ale, and an Ayinger Jahrhundert.

Before walking back to the hostel I made one more stop at a restaurant called Crab Pot, but not for any food. This establishment, I can report, makes Irish Coffees the right way: without Bailey's.

Much later when it was time for dinner, I stopped at a place that was on 1st Avenue just a few steps away from the hostel and Pike Place Market: Falafel King. Here's another place I'll recommend, since I really like the kind of vaguely-Mediterranean food they serve here. Their menu seems to be a mix of Greek and Lebanese inspired dishes. I had a falafel sandwich.

There were a couple more things to do that day. First, I wanted to go to a local indoor pool and swim some laps at least once during my week here. Tuesday night was going to be the only opportunity to do that. Remember how I borrowed a friend's SUV to get to that Spartan race on Sunday? It was still in the parking garage where I'd left it on Sunday evening. So after reclaiming that vehicle from the garage and paying however much it cost for having left it there for two days, I was heading south on I-5 on the way to the Rainier Beach Pool where I finally got my laps in. This place didn't have any light rail service which is why driving was the only option.

The other thing I had to do was drop the SUV off at the airport so its owner could drive it home after flying in later that night. Being the airport, this place did have a light rail station so I could get back downtown easily after leaving the car behind.

So, yeah, not a whole lot happened on Tuesday. I think I was running out of stuff to do this far into the trip, at least, running out of stuff that I'd already planned to do beforehand and needed to make some more plans. The next two days would be more interesting; Wednesday morning I'd be on a southbound train to Olympia.