Highmoon's Ponderings

Between the end of June and beginning of July I spent a week in Seattle with my wife and our great friend Lari and it was a blast. It had been almost 3 years since the last time I was up there and it honestly felt like going back home.

This time around, since this was Lari’s first time in the Emerald City, we did a few touristy things we hadn’t the last two times we visited, starting with going all the way up to the Space Needle. It had been overcast when we arrived but what do you know, a couple hours in, the sun started to shine and we got some wonderful views of Seattle and Puget Sound from 605 feet in the air.

Of course we also hit some places we had visited already, like Pike Place Market and Pioneer Square, where we did the Underground Tour once more and enjoyed it greatly again. We also hit our favorite bar, the Pike Brewery, as well as have that great Ovaltine Latte at Top Pot Doughnuts. We also found new favorites, like the Nutella Mocha at Bedlam Coffee in Belltown, where we were staying at the Seattle City Hostel. We visited Bamboo Garden quite a bit, given it is the only kosher place to eat in Downtown Seattle, but also made it out to Noah’s Bagels in U District and to Pabla Indian Cuisine in Issaquah. We even went to the Seattle International Beer Festival, my first, where we tried fantastic brews I would normally not get in the east coast!

July 4th we spent with our local friends John and Patricia (of CookLocal.com) and had amazing fried pizza and BBQ burgers cooked on their Big Green Egg, then watched the fireworks from a nearby I-5 overpass. We visited other great coffee houses like A Muddy Cup (their Red, White and Blue coffee was a-ma-zing!) and Bottleworks, a beer store with a small bar inside that I wanted to put in my pocket and take with me.

We also took a day-trip on the ferry (yay!) and visited Bainbridge Island, which was just so beautiful!

I missed seeing a lot of people in Seattle. A lot. It dawned on me as I kept getting queries over Twitter and Facebook how many people I know up there. I even ran into a fellow gamer at Bainbridge’s Fort Ward State Park who lives a couple streets away and came down to say hi when he saw my check-in on Foursquare (I love it when social media works as intended). In truth I would have needed at least another week just to be able to see all my friends up there.

It was a great trip, and it reminded me why is it that I wanna move up there. It is a beautiful city, with personality, chilled out yet modern, firmly places between urbanity and nature. It renewed my desire to move in the next few years for sure.

You can check out the pics on my Seattle 2011 Flickr set.

As I write this it’s been a week since Gen Con Indy 2010 opened on Thursday, August 5. I’ve been back for a few days and have had time to process all that happened to me at the show, so here goes, my review of the best four days in gaming, 2010 edition.

The City

I don’t cease to be amazed at the reception 30,000 + gamers get in this midwestern city every year. And every year I see it grow. Banners welcoming Gen Con line the streets, and about 90% of the local businesses roll out some sort of welcome for the con, be it a simple window cling to full-on embracing of the magnificent nerdery with themed menus and drinks or Gen Con-specific specials. It shouldn’t be a surprise, really, when you consider that the estimated Gen Con economic windfall for Indianapolis this year was $27 million. Still, the welcome feels honest, which is rather nice.

The Con

I heard last year was a subdued one due to the bad economy, but boy, was that not the case in 2010! The entire downtown area was busy from Wednesday till Monday when I flew back, and the convention center itself was rarely, if ever, a calm place. There was palpable excitement in the hallways and hotels and on the street. And when those Exhibit Hall doors opened on Thursday, what everyone saw was a flurry of activity that contributed to record-breaking sales for pretty much every vendor I spoke to. The Gen Con LLC team continue to improve their craft of running this massive pop-up city and keep making the experience a great one for us attendees. A special thanks goes out to the Press Room team, because we of the gaming media can be a tetchy and annoying bunch and you always found a way to help us out (my only suggestion: please enforce that the Press Room is a quiet-zone; I was recording an audio interview there at one point and we had to shush down others that were there ourselves). Also thanks to Rio Grande Games for the free Wi-Fi in the convention center (I found it annoying that the coverage excluded the Exhibit Hall, though I understand it).

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My wife has been learning the Japanese language on her own for a while, which means an appreciation of Japanese culture has seeped into our household beyond pop-culture mainstays like anime, manga, sushi and ninjas! Part of understanding a language is understanding the culture that uses it, that shaped it, and we’ve both been enriched by what we’ve learned. For some time now we’ve known we have a couple of locations with a Japanese connection we could visit in our general vicinity, and last Sunday we were finally able to make it to the largest of them, the Morikami Museum & Japanese Gardens in Delray Beach.

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I wrote a quick guide for the kosher traveler to Seattle, Washington for Yeah, That’s Kosher!, a kosher travel blog. The article is now up and you can go read it.

Seattle, WA

“Seattle seduces,” our friend Patricia said no more than three hours after we had landed at Sea/Tac Airport and had driven through the city on our way to a coffee shop in Queen Anne Hill. From this high vantage point, Seattle spread out in organized chaos, contained only by the shores of Elliot Bay and Lake Washington to the east and west respectively. The Space Needle pierced the sky, an unmoving sentinel guarding the northern end of the city, while to the south, snow-capped Mt. Rainier played peek-a-boo with its ward 70 miles away. “I could certainly get used to this,” was what I said, taking in this view, that prompted Patricia to speak her prophetic words.

[...] we found [in Seattle] a remarkable city with an abundance of personality, a multitude of activities for all kinds of visitors, and a very appealing destination for the kosher traveler.

Read the article.

Elation over my article aside, I love this website because it is dedicated to helping the kosher-observing Jew travel to more places beyond the New York/Miami worn-out route. I have a couple more ideas for articles, including Orlando, FL and even Miami (with a different twist), so expect to see more announcements like this from me.

Try as I might, I still have a problem keeping a journal while on a trip (with exceptions, those being when I’m in Europe) and I have not yet resolved the issue of internet connectivity well enough to say I’m going to blog nightly. Which is a shame, because so much gets lost when you try to come back to the memories but have little to act as mnemonics. Of course, there’s the issue of actually experiencing the place you’re visiting, and in that regard I am golden.

I had tons of fun this time around in Seattle, even if this wasn’t a touristy trip per se. Experiencing the city as a temporary local, driving around its streets (sorry Seattle, you have yet to convince me that you truly experience traffic that’s worse than I-95 in Miami), shopping in the farmers market and cooking a meal for our friends, spending a Shabbat with a local family in the Jewish community we now know we’d like to move into, these were all amazing experiences that I treasure precisely because they were out of the ordinary fare for a visitor to the city. I simply cannot wait to go back and become a permanent resident.

While the blogging/journaling was scarce, I did a lot of Twitter updates, precisely as a way to remind myself of what we did when. As a bonus, they allow me to show you a quick overview of our time in Seattle. Enjoy.

A TWITTERIZED VERSION OF SEATTLE REDUX

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That’s me at Magnusson Park, at the Fin Project (Seattle Installation). I’ll talk more about that when I get back.

I don’t want to go back, and if I’m forced, then it’s only to get things straightened out so I can return to Seattle.

I’ll be writing more updates as I can. In the meantime, you can follow me (fairly close) over at my Twitter.