Location: Seattle, Washington, USA

I feel like last night was an actual dream. Did that even happen? We slept in a wee bit later seeing as we were both up past 2 AM, but it turns out we had somewhere to be!

Katisse booked an appointment for us (happy belated birthday to me!) to have semi-permanent bracelets welded on! Sign me up heck yes please! We both opted for real gold ‘paper-clip’ style chains and happily walked out of the shop towards donuts and coffee near Pike Place Market.

The market is right off the ocean and is two floors underground and one above ground housing all manner of stalls from fresh flowers, vintage art, and artisan food fare to fresh caught seafood, cheeses and handmade clothes. I remember the market from last time I visited Seattle but a nice detail I forgot about was that the floors are this creaky dark old wood that are completely worn smooth from so much use over the years. Um cute. We stopped in at a little Italian hole in the wall eatery (with an entirely Italian language menu mind-you) called Pasta Casalinga, to share a dish for lunch and people watch over the market-goers.

The sun was beating down really hard at this point so we, of course, stopped in for another round of Salt & Straw ice-cream and then decided the pop into a place we knew had great AC: the movie theatre! Anybody from Whitehorse knows our movie theatres are just absolutely awful. Like they’re so bad they’ve almost swung back around to good, you know? Anyway this was the kind of theatre that had full on reclining seats with little tray tables. Luxurious or what! We picked the next movie that was playing which happened to be Joy Ride: a brash, kind of disgusting but hilarious comedy. Exactly the kind of ‘nothing movie’ we both needed to see as a little afternoon sun escape.

We trekked uphill towards our hotel and decided to go to hot-pot for dinner seeing as Kat had never been! It’s been a few years since I had hot pot but it’s basically Chinese-cook-your-own-soup. You order a broth of your choice (or two!) and a bunch of raw meat and veggies, and the broth gets boiled on a hot plate directly at your table while you put things in it to cook. Kind of like a meat fondue except you also eat the broth. Yummy happy tummy that’s for sure.

We only had about 3 blocks to get home from the hot-pot restaurant but as soon as we got outside we realized that from over a kilometre away we could hear the second night of Taylor Swifts performance! The crowd was singing so loudly we could pick up exactly what lyric was being sung. Literally at one point an ambulance went by us (sirens on!) and we could still hear the crowd screaming over it. FROM A KILOMETRE AWAY. That crazy, right? Yes. Yes that’s crazy.

We sat on the fire-escape of our hotel and listened to a few songs before I had to get packing to depart at ass o’clock in the morning. I was a bit sad to be leaving my little listening perch but it turns out I could hear the concert just as well from our hotel room window. You bet your boots that I’m leaving that window open until the concert is over! Sleep be damned!

I’m now sitting in bed, all packed up, writing and listening to the second night of the concert drift over the city. Thank god I have Katisse to fangirl over all this with or I think my family would kill me just to shut me up!

The adventure continues tomorrow! AT 4 AM.

Sav