As soon as we pulled into Seattle, I felt strangely at home. Maybe because I was a tourist and didn’t have to deal with the traffic, who knows; the city has a good vibe.

Of course, we started at the Pike Place Market, home to (among other things) the Pike Place Fish, where the workers throw huge fish to each other to entertain the tourists, and the (theoretically) first Starbucks retail shop, which, these days, sells the same thing that all the other Starbucks shops sell. The line was huge, so we didn’t go inside.

One of the market’s notable features is the Gum Wall. There is an improv theater below the market; as the story goes, people used to stick their chewing gum on the wall outside the theater before they went in, and in 1991 this started a trend: soon anyone who walked by added their gum to the walls lining the alley. In 2015, the city cleaned all the gum off the wall: a total of 2,350 pounds’ worth. Immediately after, of course, people started sticking gum back on the walls.

Then, of course, we went to the Space Needle. The view of Mount Rainer is pretty impressive.

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