Fairs and waterfalls

We've now been in Seattle for close to a fortnight now, and have settled into our temporary digs reasonably well (not-quite-functioning rice cooker notwithstanding!). On Friday, one of my new colleagues mentioned the Fremont Fair and Solstice Parade which was on over the weekend; another new colleague mentioned Snoqualmie, and the related waterfalls. And that was that - there was our weekend planned!

So, the Fremont Fair and Solstice Parade - Fremont is a little like Newtown, with its alternative, grungy vibe, and its embrace of the artsy, alternative types. It's also like Newtown in that the streets are impossibly narrow, especially with the monster trucks that Americans seem to favour here, and parking near where you want to be is as rare as hens teeth. Given that it felt like half of Seattle was descending into Fremont for the fair, this made the parking challenge that much harder (and have I mentioned that I'm almost, but not quite adjusted to the other side of the road? :p)

Once parking had been located, we walked for a mile to the parade, and parked ourselves along the route, for one of the main events of the fair - the Solstice Parade. A celebration of the longest day in the (Northern) year, the parade is held in Fremont on the third Saturday of every June. There's quite a unique kick-off to the parade - a gang of cyclists, where clothing is strictly optional... something we didn't realise until the parade kicked off! Needless to say, photos of this part of the parade weren't exactly what we had bargained for ;-)

After the parade of cyclists came the various floats, celebrating everything from the Magic School Bus, gay marriage, and everything in between (including lawn chairs and belly dancers!) All in all, it was a great parade to watch; everyone involved, from the spectators to the participants were having an absolute blast, with spectators regularly taking impromptu part in the parade. 

Members of the anti-smoking campaign

Err... smile?

After the conclusion of the parade, we learnt another rule of travelling - if you buy food from a van, you're more often than not going to be less than impressed by the result. After a couple of gyros, which are poor approximations of the kebabs we know and love in Sydney, we explored the fair for a couple of hours, which showcased local foods, arts and handicrafts, and more than your fair share of gigantic dogs. We also learnt another rule of travelling - pizza in Seattle is surprisingly awesome. Happy times.

Sunday took us out to Snoqualmie, a very quick drive out of Bellevue. Snoqualmie is a sleepy town, famous for its railway museum, as well the Snoqualmie Falls, which is taller than Niagara Falls, but, importantly, significantly narrower than the fabled water feature. Heading out to Snoqualmie reinforced the fact that Washington's natural beauty is incredibly accessible; 25 minutes later and we were already there, in our rickety hire care. It's a sleepy little town, with its own brewery, hardware store and curiosity shoppe, as well as a small railway museum, and a tourist train that heads up to North Bend, then returns to the station before heading up to Snoqualmie Falls. A nice, lazy way to spend the weekend, after an arduous first week at work ;)

  

Snoqualmie Falls

First day!

So, today was the day! The reason we upped and moved to Seattle... first day with Microsoft was finally here. We'd always entertained the (ever-less likely) possibility that this was all an elaborate hoax, and today was the day to prove it otherwise...

After the traditional kiribath breakfast to celebrate the first day of a new job, I drove to the Microsoft campus in Redmond for New Employee Orientation. Sounds simple right... well - I thought it would be a good idea to practice the drive to the campus beforehand, given that it was a new city, driving on the other side of the road, all of those complications. On the first practice run... got lost. On the second practice run the next day... got lost. Eventually I made it there on the practice run, which meant today's little excursion went off without a hitch. First hurdle negotiated, eventually!

Next up - finding the NEO building. They have an entire building dedicated to NEO, and I was about to find out why. Upon walking through the front door, I was directed by reception to another person, who sent me through a funky product room (which had all sorts of cool toys... I may be a Microsoft employee now, but they still looked pretty awesome!) to find my name-tag, was handed off to yet another person who gave me a temporary access badge, who handed me off to another group of people who made me fill in online forms and confirm my legal alien status, who then offloaded me to a group who took those hideous, everlasting ID badge photos and made me fill in yet more online forms... by the end of the whole process I felt like a baton being systematically offloaded by a well-practised relay team. After that, the metaphorical baton was thrown into the NEO conference room, which had well over 100 people onboarding for their first (and in some cases, returning first) day with Microsoft. With that many people, having a separate building for new employees makes a lot of sense... and they do this every Monday!

Following that was the commencement of official proceedings, and an information overload from one of the HR managers at Microsoft. Lots of great information, and very well structured and presented - they obviously put a lot of time and effort into onboarding fresh employees into the company. A lot of the people in the room had been relocated, both from within the US as well as internationally, there were very few Seattle locals in the room.

After absorbing bucket-loads of information, and meeting some of my fellow newbies, off to the Microsoft Commons for lunch. This area was developed in response to employee requests and requirements, and is a pretty awesome place for lunch, and catching up with people - all restaurants are branches of Seattle local restaurants, and there's even a replica of Pike Place Markets tucked in there. On top of that, there's also a bevy of local stores, banks and services, including all major mobile network providers - thank you AT&T for our new numbers :) with ample seating inside and out, and a great selection of food, the Commons is a fantastic place for lunch. Pity I'm not working at that campus on a day-to-day basis...

The rest of the day was spent talking about benefits (yay!) and other administrative niggles, before we were released from NEO, complete with Microsoft badges identifying us as fully-fledged employees. Drunk on our new employment statuses, we all did the sensible thing and went home early.

I was tempted to take photos along the way to try and visually document the process, but given the number of iPhone jokes the presenters were cracking, I thought it may not be quite the best strategy for my first day. Still, a lot of people there had their iPhones out in plain sight, so I'm safe for now, but I may need to switch to a Windows phone at some point...

Next steps - turn up for a real day at work tomorrow, find my computer (wonder if it'll have Windows 8), and figure out whether I'm going to try joining the Microsoft cricket team. They could be good, in which case I shouldn't bother, or they might not be - in which case I'll fit right in!

Seattle: First Impressions

We've arrived! Checked into a downton Bellevue apartment Tuesday night. We drove here in the dark and therefore couldn't really appreciate the views. This place is green beyond all green, everything is luscious and well tended to. I get the impression that you couldn't stop things growing even if you wanted to!

The apartment
It's spacious (something we're still getting used to).  It's a 2, 2 1 and has plenty of storage.

It looks something like this:

The kitchen, can you gauge the size of the oven and the microwave... They are both ginormous! However, there was no kettle. Two Lankans, making tea in the microwave? I think not. A quick trip to Costco - and can you see our brand new purchase in the left corner?

The bedroom

The living room

Bellevue
Bellevue is about 20 minutes east of Seattle and our temporary home. We're here for about 2 months at least. It's quieter than Seattle proper but still has great shopping (a mall on every corner) and a beautiful park. Bellevue Square, the slightly upmarket shopping centre and home of fancy clothing stores, also has a Teavana, America's answer to T2. Not quite as awesome but definitely something to fill the void.  I'm not sure we'll live here but it's a lovely place to be, and central enough to get to places. Nuwan is most likely going to be working here, so it's important it's nice.

The rain (we know you're wondering about it)
Look what I caught on camera today.....blue sky!

I thought you might be reluctant to believe us unless we showed you proof. Truth be told the weather is actually quiet pleasant, very similar to London. Very often, there's four seasons in one day. Yesterday started of drizzly, we drove to Redmond in sunshine, walked into Costco in the wind and came out in pouring rain. It was fine and sunny by the time we walked out again.

The food (we were wondering about this)
So far so good. We went to Costco... did you know that Seattle is the home of Costco? Well it is and we went yesterday and got about a year's supply of trash bags, amongst other things.

Trash bags = bin bags or garbage bags, not scantily clad females with loose morals

We've found a fabulous Asian grocery called Uwajimaya, it's all the shops in Flemo stuck together and has just about everything we needed. It even had curry leaves!

We also found an Indian spice shop that had a small Larich section... imagine my excitement at seeing Larich in Seattle!

Seattle is also big on locally produced, organic and sustainably sourced produce. Everything here is about being green, about saving the environment and about eating only happy animals, something I find quite easy to deal with. Even the taxis are Prius....this I could get used to.

The people


We've not encountered many but everyone I've encountered is kind and helpful. The other day I asked a shelf stacker at Safeway where the handwashing liquid was and she stopped what she was going and led me to the right aisle and spot....talk about service.

Driving on the other side of the road (I need to stop saying...wrong side)
Look at Nuwan's serious driving face.

This is more Nuwan's domain, I haven't driven yet. I have been in the passenger seat which I consider pretty brave. It's confusing, the right turn is the easy one the left the one where you have to watch for oncoming traffic. When you reverse you have to turn your head right and you check your blindspot to the left when overtaking, and to look at your rearview mirror you have to flick your eyes up and to the right.

Nuwan says that each time he gets behind the wheel it gets better. I'm hoping the same is true for me!

The city (Seattle proper)

Seattle is a harbour city and the most iconic building is this.... a Space Needle

We haven't visited it but we saw it out of our car. Surely that counts for something.
We've only visited one part of the city, the famous Pike Place Markets.

Pike Place Markets is a market located on Elliot Bay. Named after the street it runs along, it has everything from flowers to fish, to second-hand books and beads. It goes down as well as up and has levels and levels of shops and stalls. The only rule in the market is that everything sold has to be local.

It has no chain stores except for one, Starbucks (one of Seattles own too) because this is the first one. It's always busy and from the looks of it always has a bluegrass band outside.

It's famous for its fish stalls, with singing fishmongers and flying fish. It's an amazing place and full of fresh vegies and lot of good things to eat like sourdough bread and habanero and raspberry jam.

The vibe

It's hard to sum this up with what we've seen but here are some salient points

• Seattle is politically left-leaning Democrat
• It's focused on sustainability - down to its green cabs
• It has a proud food culture that prides itself on using local, sustainable ingredients. If your chef doesn't know the name of the chicken that laid our egg....well then that's just not cricket.
• You can buy everything organic and sometimes it's harder to find non-organic produce. 
• It's very multicultural 

Tomorrow we hit the outlet malls and spend a bit more time exploring Seattle itself.

Hawaii Food Tours - Hole-in-the-wall tour!

Bill and Sahara

This morning we were picked up by the friendly Bill and Sahara on the Hawaiian food tour bus. It wouldn't really be a Chath and Nuwan holiday without a food experience so we had to oblige. This came highly recommend on Trip Advisor and by all signs looked pretty amazing. 

Royal Kitchen -  Manapau

Manapau is a Hawaiian breakfast food. It's the Hawaiian version the steamed pork bun. The fillings are a little bit different and the actual bun is a Hawaiian sweet bread. You can get the steamed version just like at Yum Cha but today we had the baked version. There is a multitude of fillings including traditional char sui, curry chicken, kahlua the traditional Hawaiian bbq pig and even portugese sausage

The bun is delicious, we tried the kahlua pig and the char sui. The char sui was the best by far. A fabulous way to start the day.

Liliha bakery for Coco-Puffs

This is kind of like a profiterole. A choux pastry shell with a chantilly cream icing and a chocolate custard filling. This traditional American style diner is always packed and is famous for having been featured on Hawaii 5-0. The video inside is has the particular episode in question on repeat. The puff is incredibly sweet (by Aussie standards) but very delicious. I still prefer a traditional profiterole but would not say no to more of these! This bakey sells 7000 of these puffs a day. Curiously Liliha translates to "being nauseated by rich and fatty foods"

China Town

Honolulu's China town is basically an Asian melee, Korean, Philipino, Chinese, Vietnamese and even traditional Hawaiian shops. We ventured in on foot and surrounded ourselves with Asian food galore. 

Rice-paper Factory

This place is a bit of an institution, the only one of it's kind it Hawai'i. A factory that makes rice noodles by hand. We saw the huge steamers that are used to steam the rice flour and water mixture of trays. A group of women then roll them into slabs that are then flavoured with spring onion, pork and shrimp. Some a left plain and sliced into noodles.

BBQ Chicken

We ate the rice noodles with delicious Korean BBQ chicken and teriyaki sauce.

Pork wonton and "pepeiau" dumplings

For lack of a better name this was like a pork meatball topped with egg noodle. A form of Hawaiian yum cha. It's eaten with  a hot sauce made of mustard and soy sauce. We ate these with Pepeiau dumplings, like Hawaiian gow gee, filled with pork, prawns and radish.

Spam

Spam is huge is Hawaii. Brought here in the 50's to feed the GIs in the absense of real meat, spam is a staple here. People love it and are proud to admit they love it. A really popular food is spam musubi, here's what Wiki says on the subject. 

Spam musubi is a popular snack and lunch food in Hawaii composed a slice of grilled Spam atop of a block of rice, wrapped together with nori in the tradition of Japanese omusubi.

Inexpensive and portable, spam musubi is commonly found near cash registers in convenience stores all over Hawaii.

Lychees and Longan

We had some lychees and longan too. Delicous but different to Australia.

Sashimi

I'll leave this to Nuwan, I do not eat raw fish!

Coconut Tarts and Apple Bananas

These apparently need to be eaten together.. The coconut tart is a cross between a coconut macaroon and a biscuit.  The native Hawaiian banana is the apple banana, slightly tart, short and stout it's quite yummy and goes very well with the coconut tart.

Pineapple and Lychee Smoothies

A delicious smoothy finished off with some LHM vodka.

A little bit of time left to explore china town and we found these
Ohu - a Hawaiian fish

and Baby baby gourd still on the vine

Cracked Seed

What on Earth is Crack Seed???
Crack seed, a popular local snack in Hawaii, comes in a variety of shapes, sizes, and flavors. Also known as Li Hing Mui or See Mui, crack seed is actually a variety of dehydrated and preserved fruits. If you've never tried this local favorite, read on!

Presevered plums have actually gone through a huge cycle in Hawaii, originally highly salted the plantation worked quickly figured out that eating salty snacks was actually dehydrated. The salted plums them became hydrated and a less salty version. Nowadays it is sold with the seed cracked,(hence crack seed) , with the seed or even seedless. The snack is also known by it's traditional chinese name Li Hing Mui. It's so popular they've even turned it into a powder that can be sprinkles on everything from margeritas to popcorn. We tried a small dried, deseeded version. An acquired taste, I don't think it's for everyone.

Char Sui House

Exactly as it's described the best BBQ house in Hawaii. Here we ate Char Sui and 5 layers of heaven (roast pork belly with crackling). Having lived in flemington where Hong Kong style BBQ houses are pretty good and pretty common I have to say this place was pretty amazing. 

Malasadas

Last but certainly not least. 

A malasada is a throwback to Hawaii's Portugese history. A yeast dough like a dough nut it fried, minus the holds. This creates a ball of crisp fried dough that is fluffy. It is sprinkled with sugar and if you're after some extra sweetness filled with custard; chocolate, coconut and even guava. 

All in all a fabulous day with a food coma to top it off at the end.!

Pearl Harbour

Or should I say Pearl Harbor. We headed to the site of this tragic event in American history yesterday morning. We're both history geeks and love museums so thought it was about time.

We took a 1.5 hour bus ride there, if that's not dedication then I don't know what is.

The Pearl Harbor memorial encompasses 4 sites, the USS Arizona Memorial, USS Bowfin, USS Missouri and the Pacific Aviation Museum.

The Arizona is free but required a wait for our 11:15am time slot, so while we waited we checked out the USS Bowfin, a submarine that survived WWII. I know little about submarines but was impressed by the way such tiny spaces were used to house beds, galleys, dining rooms and even bathrooms.



It was stiflingly hot inside and I couldn't imagine what it would be like when the sub when "silent" and had to shut off all air conditioning at the depths of ocean.

Once the USS Bowfin was covered we headed to see the USS Arizona. This is the main memorial at Pearl Harbour.

During the Second World War the Americans tried to thwart Japan's expansion into South-East Asia by imposing sanctions on the Japanese. Japan, unimpressed by America's interference in their military action,  planned the attack as a way of debilitating the American Pacific fleet and America's ability to stop Japan's military actions. So it was on the morning of December 7 1941 the Japanese army launched a surprise attach on the Navy battleships. 


From wikipedia
"The base was attacked by 353 Japanese fighters, bombers and torpedo planes in two waves, launched from six aircraft carriers. All eight U.S. Navy battleships were damaged, with four being sunk. Of these eight damaged, two were raised, and with four repaired, six battleships returned to service later in the war. The Japanese also sank or damaged three cruisers, three destroyers, an anti-aircraft training ship and one minelayer. 188 U.S. aircraft were destroyed; 2,402 Americans were killed and 1,282 wounded."

The attack was a huge shock to the Americans and caused the entry of America into WWII both in the Pacific and in Europe.

The USS Arizona was the biggest of all the battleships and it's been turned into a memorial, celebrating the valor of the soldiers who died and those who survived. 

The tour stars with a video, highlighting the main points of the attack. A short boat trip takes you out to the memorial for 15 minutes to look at not only the memorial but the USS Arizona that lies beneath.

All in all it was an interesting day, lots of history and topped off by spicy pork Manapua, something I'll tell you more about shortly. 

Lazy Waikiki

Our first couple of days have been pretty idyllic, for the most part. While still to get a true handle on just how big everything in the US is (their trucks, food servings, drinks... why is a small beer a pint???), we've had a good run for the first few days of our week in limbo, between Sydney and Seattle.


Wednesday was a day of laze - a walk down the beach, a walk back up the beach, lying on the beach, going for a quick dip at the beach... I'm sure you can see the theme of the day by now :) was incredibly difficult to pass up on the opportunity when the beach in question looks like this:

After a bit of a walk up and down Waikiki, we came to the foregone conclusion that it's very much tourist town here - but that's ok, we knew that when we arrived :) 


Hunting down dinner was the next order of the day, but first things first - apparently there's a free hula show for an hour every evening down at Kuhio Beach Park, which apparently is pretty good, so we went search for it. It was due to start at sunset, however sunset came, and went (if that is indeed the expression), and no sign of said hula show. A little disappointed, we found a Korean place that served ridiculous amounts of food, and got stuck into some cheap and cheerful Asian food. A quick chat to the concierge confirmed that the show only ran every other day, and this wasn't one of those days... go figure.


On the flipside, taking photos near the water at sunset is fun:

Thursday saw the two of us take on Kailua Bay with kayaks, a generous gift from Mrs Firehouse's teacher friends from HWPS. For two people who don't kayak very often (never!), we took on the bay with quite some vigour, and surprised ourselves by being one of the first across the bay! Having landed on Flat Island, we were treated to a nature lesson from our tour guide, before heading back for some hard-earned (and large of course) lunch. 

The evening saw us finally hunt down our hula girls as promised by the concierge - it was quite a good show, fun and traditional, with the added "benefit" of a homeless man who decided to join in the fun, swinging his hips for a song before someone in charge shooed him away with a big stick.

Dinner at a Mexican place that TripAdvisor told us was good - we finally got out quantities right! Great margaritas, spicy and chicken wings and chilli pork made for a fantastic dinner, all of which we polished off with great ease. We've never been a great fan of Mexican food in Sydney, have never been able to find anything that we'd go back for. As the theory goes, Mexican food should be better in the US, and our first experience in Waikiki certainly lived up to that expectation.

Aloha Hawaii

Well, what can I say about Hawaii. It's everything you'd want from Paradise. It's pretty much always sunny here, it smells of the sea and everywhere you look around Waikiki beautiful people are wearing barely there bikinis and pulling it off.
It's the life.
On the flip side everything is ludicrously expensive, there is abject poverty and more homeless people then I've seen in a long time.
We're staying at the Moana Surfrider .

We've walked up and down the main stretch here at is is the most beautiful hotel around. The inside is just as spectacular, decorated in a colonial plantation style.
The hotel courtyard is built around an ancient banyan tree and you step out from the courtyard into the sand. It's idyllic really.

Yesterday was our first day here and we wandered the streets a little after we got here. We finally settled down to a lunch of Vietnamese noodles and rice. Maybe it was the homesickness that had us reaching for the lemon grass chicken and rice.
After lunch we lay on the beach a while, read books and napped. When dinner time finally rolled around we decided to hunt down The Cheesecake Factory.
As we walked in both inside and outside was packed; upon reaching the counter we realised it was because there was a 50-minute wait for a table. Since neither of us were particularly hungry we decided the wait was worth it. We grabbed a buzzer (someone should suggest this to the owners of Iron Chef) and seated ourselves on the rock wall outside. 50 minutes is a long time, we read magazines, I browsed Forever 21 which was in the building next door and we both took turns deciding what we wanted on the menu. When our buzzer finally flashed red we knew what we wanted, entrees, mains and desserts.
As the hostess took us to our table way back in a part of the restaurant you can't even imagine from the street she informed us that the servings are extremely generous.
So, when we got to our table we ditched the idea of the entrees and ordered our meals from Ben, the tallest waiter I'd ever met. Nuwan's BBQ pork burger came out, seemingly innocous and small; it defeated him. Me, I got two salads in place of the one tostada salad I had ordered. Described as a salad of mixed lettuce, spring onions, chicken, beans, avocado, tomatoes, sourcream and tostadas I expected a small bowls with all the above.
In stead I got this, and that plate is like a platter.

So as I struggled through the mound, I appealed to Nuwan for help, he too was struggling with his Kalua pulled pork burger. In the end the salad defeated me, while totally delicious I could only finish half.

In the end, we left The Cheesecake Factory without even consuming a piece of cheesecake!