through the eye of the space needle

I am typing this lying in the hammock fiona bought me for my birthday while our sweet potato cooks in foil on the campfire. We are in olympic national park at the heart of the hills campsite. We are here for our second time heading back towarards Seattle. But i digress when we last wrote we were on the train heading to seattle.

We did the tourist things in seattle, had a coffee at the first ever starbucks, with a hostel opposite there were quite a few homeless guys around with inventive signs to encourage donations, the two we saw were "please give me a dollar i need to buy beer" "i bet you a dollar you read this sign". Considering i thought there signs notworthy enough to write about i know feel like a bit of a git for giving nothing to either of them! We also went to the fish market in town that has lots of other good stuff too a bit like Borough market in london. Although the market was nice it lacks authenticity nowadays, there are a handful of seafood stalls and vistors wait around until the guys on the stall decide to throw a fish to each other for the benefit of the cameras and in hope of a tip. It seems that there is no real need to throw fish any more, capitalism it seems has provided quicker and more efficient means of rapid fish transportation or just that the chinese or other growing economy can throw them quicker for less money.

We also visted the REI flagship store, literally as exciting as that sounds. It is an outdoor shop in central seattle so big it has a cycle test route running around the outside. We thought you could hire camp cooking equipement here but it was just the stoves so we ended up shelling out for a load of cooking stuff but it is all really good.

On our first night there we also met some friends of friends from felixstowe chris and his wife katja who gave us a night time tour of the city and the space needle.

In our hotel room i watched some robot chicken a series sadly lacking from the uk schedules. The adverts for pharmaceuticals are absolutely awesome, you typically have a pair of older people smiling with a beautfiul sunset in the background while a two minute long disclaimer is read out at the end of the advert - "taxonell is known to increase risk of cancer in forty percent of users, has in some cases led to bleeding from the eyes, incontinence, puffing of the face, blurring of vision and premature death" - throughout these announcements the happy couple continue to gaze at the sunset unperturbed by the side effects of the drug they have just taken.