Seattle Experience Music Project

Jimi Hendrix was born in Seattle and it is where his music career started. To commemorate him and his music, Paul Allen (co-founder of Microsoft), founded the Experience Music Project Museum. After a few years the focus of the museum has changed, and it started displaying memorabilia and artifacts commemorating other Seattle-based artists as well (e.g. Nirvana). A part of the museum is also dedicated to science fiction and technology, especially those technical elements behind some of the recent famous movies/TV series (like Avatar and Battlestar Galactica).

We enjoyed the exhibits dedicated to Nirvana and Avatar, but we were not at all interested in the exhibit dedicated to Battlestar Galactica. I guess you have to be a fan of the movie to enjoy it. We also had a lot of fun exploring the Guitar Gallery which documents the history of electric guitar development, and an interactive Sound Lab, where one can have fun learning the basics of playing various instruments and mixing music.


The building in which museum is located is also quite a sight, thanks to its architect Frank Gehry:

The Avatar Gallery:

The Sky Church:

The Nirvana Gallery:

The Guitar Gallery:

Neal Potter's "Roots and Branches" statue:

The Sound Lab:

Space Needle in Seattle

The Space Needle is a major landmark of Seattle. I would estimate that 99% of visitors to the city go up the Space Needle, so normally that would not be a place that we would visit. However, as the day was gorgeous, we decided to follow the standard touristy route and take an elevator up the Needle to see Seattle from up above.

The views from the top are indeed fantastic. The observation deck of the Space Needle is located at 520 feet (160 m) and the highest point of the Space Needle is at 605 feet (184 m). Therefore, on a good day, you can see as far as 100 miles from there and enjoy the views of the Olympic and Cascade Mountains, Mount Rainier, Mount Baker, Elliott Bay and surrounding islands. We could not see that far, as the sky was overcast outside of Seattle. Still, we got to enjoy the views of the Downtown Seattle, which made it worth going up the tower.


Seattle Skyline from the Space Needle:

Space Needle during the day:

Space Needle at night:

Seattle Skyline

Seattle is a quite lovely city. It is about the same size as Portland (six hundred thousand residents in the city proper, and three million in its metropolitan area), but it feels much bigger than the latter.

In many ways Seattle is a combination of San Francisco and Portland. It has some skyscrapers (like San Francisco), but it feels a bit more suburban (like Portland). It also has good restaurants and beautiful nature around it (like both of the cities), and a reputation for heavy coffee consumption (like Portland). In fact, several famous coffee companies (like Starbucks, Seattle's Best Coffee, Tully's) were founded in Seattle.

If only the weather were better there, it would be a very nice place to live. However, Seattle averages only 71 sunny days a year, so I don't think we will move there any time soon :) The bad weather did not seem to discourage students from hanging out at the Alki Park Beach, which has a similar vibe to the Pacific Beach (PB) in San Diego. For us, it was too cold, so instead of hanging out at the beach, we went to a nearby restaurant for a nice Thai meal.

After the dinner we went back to the beach to take some photos of downtown Seattle. It was slowly starting to get dark, so my hope was to capture a few good shots of Seattle both during and after the sunset. This turn out to be a several-hour-long photographic assignment and despite wearing a jacket and having eaten a generous meal, I was still freezing cold. But I think the pictures were worth it.


A few shots of Seattle Skyline, shot over a span of four hours: