Seattle

After more than 2 hours of delay, I finally arrived in Seattle around 1am this morning. My friend's apartment is very nice, heavily decorated with Ikea's furnitures and floral paintings, with bright red and orange here and there. There is a very wide big window occupying half of the wall directly facing the center of Seattle.
Sitting in the middle of the hillside gives the apartment a very good view. I was very impressed with the thick, layered, and wide spreading clouds covering the blue sky (certainly a contrast with the super clean sky in South California), which sets up a nice background for the space needle (one of the marks of Seattle) right in front of me. Doubtlessly, this is a perfect spot for me to watch fireworks on July 4th:-). The changing clouds is continually shaping the lighting of the city. The shade intersperses with the light, making the scene interesting and lovingly. As expected, occasionally, it rains. The funny thing is I feel like I can see the rain more easily than feel it. It doesn't bother me, but I can clearly see threads of rains in the sun light.

It was much more chilly as expected. After a super short walk, it forced me to get back to add a jacket and change my shoes. I started regretting that I didn't bring enough thick clothes.

Walking around revealed that it is a very nice neighborhood. I spotted several cute restaurants, including a Chinese and a Thai, which are my favorite. I also encountereed a very big grocery store in just a few blocks. Things are expensive there, but the quality seems to be pretty good. I also found many small independent coffee houses at the corners of streets, and more importantly, they all have free wifi access! Now I was relieved that I don't need to worry about how to spend some quality time in Seattle anymore:-).

One of the advantages of living in an urban area is the energy and the more pervasive coverage of wifi. At around noon, some energetic music from Seattle Center started shaking up the city, indicating there were some events going on. I felt I was somewhat involved although I had no idea what was going on. My wifi card detected a long list of access points, revealing some funny names, such as "loveU", and I could also tell that one of our neighbors is chinese based on his or her access point name:-). Of course, without any trouble, I got connected to the internet, with a very decent accessing speed.