Delta Engine Blog

After a rude wakeup from the housekeeping lady that didn't see me in my bed (how is that even possible?) I collected some tourist info brochures and checked out where I want to go today. Later I met up with Christina and Jerry and had some brunch. Not only do Americans go out to eat in the evening, lunch and even breakfast/brunch is popular too. I guess I can never adapt to that, it just costs so much time going out all the time ..

Anyway, we ended up in the Fremont District. This is the Aurora Ave. North (99) Highway.

And under it there is a troll eating and stealing cars. Its not a myth, there he is, good thing I don't own a car.

And the other direction. Nice HDR effect btw. It does also look a little nicer than my XNA Racer game from below the road, but well, the game is above the road and it looks good there.

Now thats a pretty interesting sign. It does not only tell you about the local directions, it has also Taiwan, the Guggenheim museum in New York and the center of the world on it. Just in case you forgot about any of these.

There is the Seattle Space Needle at daylight and the Seattle Center Park it is in. We will come back to that later.

The skyline of Seattle at daylight. This picture was taken from the bay area. I'm on my way to the Seattle Aquarium.

Yay, some water .. But it is very cold all year, you can't even swim in the ocean in the summer time.

Here are some pictures from inside the Seattle Aquarium. This are 2 sea otters having some fun.

And some seals swimming around. Good thing no sharks are here. Hey wait a second, a little further along they might be some.

This room is pretty cool. It is basically a sphere with little windows in every direction. And it is underwater, which would make sense in an aquarium with all these fishes swimming around.

Where are all these bubbles are coming from, and why is there a yellow tube going down?

Oh, a scuba diver is doing some fishing. Well, that is not really a big challenge with all these fish in this tank.

Some starfish, which can be touched. They are rock solid.

But there were also a lot of wobbly and soft fishes and plants in the water, which felt strange.

Ahhh, there is a shark above me. Ohh, its just plastic.

Hey, wait a second, this ones are not plastic. I wounder if they are strong enough to kill me. They don't look very big or strong. But I'm no jackass going into the water to find out :)

Some very colorful fishes.

And some more colorful plants. At least I'm not the only one taking pictures. But I guess I'm the only one blogging about it and taking pictures of other people taking pictures.

Enough of that aquarium. Let's check out this "Ye Olde Curiosity Shop".

3 Chinese Girls testing out crazy hats. But there was nothing useful in the shop for me. I just got a couple of postcards.

Wait a second? After leaving the shop and walking along the bay there is another shop with the same name on it? Deja vu. The 2 shops are actually the same and for some reason it is "normal" here to put up the same buildings right beside each other. For example Seattle has build 2 new sport stadiums right beside each other instead of improving the roads or even think of a better way to do public transportation.

Time to leave the bay area and head to the city.

Lets take the underground tour, so many people told me I had to do that.

After an introduction and some history about Seattle the tour began. Hey look over there, a sky scraper.

This is actually the Smith Tower and it was once the biggest building in the US. It was build by the Lyman C. Smith, which was one of the first manufacturer of typewriters. Good thing I got my own layout and don't have to live with same same layout that was invented over 100 years ago to prevent the keys of the typewriters to get stuck when typing nearby keys too fast.

Finally underground, which was once the ground level for this area of Seattle. It was elevated to move everything up and make the city more secure and save against floodings. But why am I looking at a toilet? Ohh well, toilets with the flush ability were inveted here too ..

This was the nice lady touring us through the underground. She made a lot of jokes and we didn't get very much of them, but she kept going, which was funny again. In the background you see a pic of time before the great fire in Seattle that destroyed all these newly build wodden houses.

Some junk down here from the time they build the new elevated street level.

An old rusty tank.

I also took a lot more pictures, but it was way too dark down there. And when I got up it was dark too, but still kinda early (I sometimes stay up at this time ^^). Well, my camera could not take any decent pictures and it has a long length of exposure (which means I had to stay still for few seconds to get a steady image).

Anyway, here are some random pictures from Seattle.

This is the bottom of the pretty tall Rainier Square building with a nice laser showing some figures.

A glowing christmas tree made out of light tubes.

This is how taxis look in Seattle.

The monorail, a pretty cool train to drive you from the center of the city to the Seattle Center (where the Space Needle is) in just a couple of minutes. It also doesn't cost anything, but it just drives back and forth between these 2 points on a 3 stores high railway.

This is the Seattle Space Needle tower from below. But it was already very dark and it would not make much sense to take pictures from above with this crappy camera. I will probably come back here tomorrow and then waste the 14 dollars it takes just to get up there.

Before going back to my hotel I checked out the park a little bit and saw this cool taffy machine.

Well, this is actually a nice sign for me as the last pedestrian standing. I was just a few hundred meters from my hotel, but this crazy 6 lane road was separating me from the way to my hotel.

Finally home I can now to some coding, my hands are shaking, I have to do something. But maybe it is just all that coffee finally kicking in ;-)