Unboxed

Thank God for Memorial Day weekend – one of the bad things about America is the scarcity of holidays. Today I was able to finally settle in and get rid of all the boxes.

On Thursday I took the knowledge test for driving. I can drive with my Spanish license, but I’m legally required to get a WA state driver’s license. Anyway I thought the process was a scam.
The vision test: I asked to be tested without glasses first. In Spain I only just made it without glasses, but that was ten years ago, and although my vision hasn’t declined by much, it has declined. But here: “Please read the top row”. I read the first four out of eight letters, but can’t even guess at the rest. I’m ready to put my glasses on, but the lady tells me to continue. “Is the yellow light inside or outside the red box?” – “inside”. “Where are the flashing lights coming from?” – “left and right”. “OK, you passed”.
The knowledge test was so silly, I felt stupid for taking the time to read the manual the night before.
I’m very happy I’m not required to wear glasses to drive in the US, but this reinforces my impression that anybody is allowed a license here, which is not reassuring.

This morning I finally went for a run in the neighborhood. It’s very nice, very bike friendly too, and I plan to go for a ride next weekend. I’m lazy these days, and enjoying it.
Some photos:

The deck in my apartment:

The living room:

The kitchen:

The dining/office room:

Homes and numbers

I moved into the new place on Thursday, and since then I’ve been arranging my things little by little. Of course, the most important for me were the electronics. I sat down on the sofa and listened to music as soon as I had my hifi set out. I also watched the first DVD of Michael Palin’s series on the Himalaya, which is promising. I sorted my kitchenware pretty quickly, and my clothes, um, are coming along.

When I was looking for apartments there was a handy little tool I kept using, walkscore. It’s a website that measures how dependent you would be on having a car, if you lived at a given address. The address gets a score from 0 to 100, 100 meaning you can do everything on foot. There is also a little map showing you the nearest grocers, banks, restaurants, parks…

My new apartment scores a very respectable 92. I was curious to see what my old place in New York would score, and of course, it got 100.

While I was playing with walkscore, after having signed the contract, I became aware of a little pattern:

- 505 Belmont ave, Seattle – current address

- 505 W54th st, New York – previous address

- 500 Riverside drive, New York – my IHouse days

Hmm, this bodes well…

My new neighborhood is called Capitol Hill. It’s possible to walk from it to downtown Seattle, but it feels like a town (as does downtown compared to New York). The streets are quiet, and lined with trees, and there is very little traffic noise except in Broadway. Crucially for me, near my place are some of the bigger parks in the city. I also found out that one of the two running clubs in Seattle is a short walk away. That’s another pattern.

The apartment is fantastic. Yes, the floors are hardwood, which I was about to give up on. Possibly the most impressive feature is that it has a deck with a view:

Discovery Park

The search for an apartment is over at last; I’ll be moving out of temp housing in the next days. This weekend I was so tired, I decided to stay local, even though I no longer have the sword of Damocles over my head, and I still haven’t visited Vancouver nor Portland.

Seattle is a good place to walk, and, being a small city, you can cover it easily. On Sunday I drove to Discovery Park, a beautiful and unkempt place in the westernmost tip of Seattle. I’ve previously gone there to run. One of the bad things about Belltown, the neighborhood where I’ve been living, is that there are no good parks nearby; I’ve been driving to parks to run – I don’t like running in the streets.

Back to Discovery Park – I think calling it a park is an understatement, it’s more like woods or a forest, and it also has fantastic views of Puget Sound. In the center it’s so heavily lined with trees and bushes that you can tell the difference in the air, which is much cooler and more humid than just outside the park.

Driving a hybrid

The easiest thing I’ve done in Seattle so far is get a car. I just walked into the Toyota dealership and told them I was interested in a Prius. Within 20 minutes, I had taken a drive, and decided on a color from the cars they had available right away. I thought I’d need tons of documentation, but no, just a photocopy of my Spanish driver’s license and insurance were needed. We took care of insurance there, and all that was needed for that was my Spanish driver’s license! I find it funny, considering how hard most other things are, such as visas, job background checks, or renting apartments. But please, a car for everyone!

Of course, I got a Prius because I LOVE the environment, I really do. I think it’s doing a great job. I always think there should be more of it. “More environment!”, I always say. But back to the Prius, it has changed the way I drive. On the dashboard it has a display of your current fuel economy (in miles per gallon (mpg)), and a little bar chart which shows your recent history of fuel economy, in five minute intervals. It also shows your overall fuel economy. The Prius is supposed to get about 42 mpg., which is the best of any car currently. When I got mine, the average was 37.5, but I’ve been driving carefully, and right now it’s doing 44.8 overall. Indeed, I’ve become a competitive mileage pusher. When I’m on the road I constantly keep an eye on that economy display, and I become annoyed if I’m not doing well. The main way of achieving good economy is avoiding sudden accelerations or decelerations, so these days I’m annoying many drivers by taking my sweet time to advance in traffic jams. It’s a good thing that drivers in Seattle are extremely polite!

On housing in Seattle

I’ve been in temp housing about a month now, and want to have my own place so I can take my things out of storage: my hi-fi set, my flatscreen, my bike, books. I’m nothing without these!

The search for a place is so far less stressful than it was in New York (everything here is less stressful), but very frustrating: it’s almost impossible to find places with hardwood floors in the area. It’s always carpet wall to wall, apparently for noise damping as well as economy. I’ve only seen hardwood in a pair of condos in concrete-and-steel buildings. Some of the places I’ve seen that advertise hardwood floors turn out to have hardwood only in the kitchen. The kitchen? That’s where I would NOT have hardwood. What is wrong with these people?

The places I’ve seen tend to go cheap on the materials – carpet, vinyl floored bathrooms – but expensive on complements – sauna, in-house gym, conference room. Methinks they got it backwards.

I also looked at a couple of places in the suburbs that left me unimpressed, but at the moment I’m leaning towards staying in the city.

More news on this front coming soon, I hope.

Joining the blogosphere

Ah, my selfless motives to join: it was already difficult to keep my friends and family in Madrid well informed, but now that I have left New York to go to Seattle, I have so many more people to give updates to! I find myself writing the same things, more or less, in many different emails.

In one of those strange actions that are meant to be lazy but will probably entail lots of work, I’ve decided to start this blog. Next time someone asks “so how’s it going in Seattle?” I can point here, maybe.

Enjoy, or don’t. Up to you!