These days Seattle is hovering on the edge of greatness. If and when a comprehensive light-rail syst

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As the plane begins its descent into Seattle ’s airport I write on the inside cover of my notebook: ‘New take on Seattle necessary for article. Avoid all weather clichés and weather by-products. No rain, no melancholy, no coffee, no flannel, no grunge.’
It’s not going to be easy. As we cut through the melancholy, leaden sky, the new Boeings parked on the tarmac of Boeing Field like so many late-model cars, our airplane shakes from the crosswind on approach, pelted by the Northwest’s machine-gun travel hanging bag fire of rain, the remains of my coffee spilling onto my flannel shirt, and the chorus of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” queuing up in the Wurlitzer of my mind. “Hello, hello, hello, how low.” Welcome to Seattle. Always different. Always the same.
I write fiction for a living, so I go to Seattle a lot . Perhaps because of homegrown amazon.com, perhaps in spite of it, Seattle (and its smaller cousin Portland, Oregon) are the last places in America where books are still a dominant part of the culture, consumed, discussed, pondered, and critiqued with gusto. But let’s hold off on the literary for a moment. Seattle is a frame of mind. Nature surely wasn’t on sabbatical when she conjured travel hanging bag up this landscape of hills and water. Even the world’s most distracted person will find room for serious meditation and introspection travel hanging bag here, a place for the mind to power down into a deep regenerative sleep as a fresh drizzle travel hanging bag plays against the windowpane. I’m on the life-affirming ferry ride from Seattle to Bainbridge travel hanging bag Island, the city’s rather quaint steel-and-glass travel hanging bag skyline receding behind me, nature rushing in to tickle the eye with aquatic sparkles of sun, the green, hibernating islands strung out across the horizon like outstretched arms. A big, bearded man choking on his loneliness tells me the story of his life, which concludes with the line “I was too stressed out working at the Hilton, so now I just take the ferry back and forth.” This seems to me to sum up some greater Pacific Northwestern wisdom. Cue the melancholy—this is not a city that chooses to turn its back on sadness. There are many things to do in Seattle but after a while, with a sense of resignation, one just may take the ferry back and forth.
These days Seattle is hovering on the edge of greatness. If and when a comprehensive light-rail system is finally built, easing the city’s Bangkok-grade traffic jams, that “world city” effect may well be achieved. But not everyone may be pleased. More than just about any other city in America, Seattle is a city of fierce neighborhood patriots, all attached to their particular hills like the Romans.
My friend Christopher Frizzelle is one such patriot of a particular hill, in his case Capitol Hill, perched commandingly over downtown, one of the world’s great full-service neighborhoods, awash in everything from Seattle-style Indian thali to salted-caramel ice cream. Chris works at America’s strangest and clearly best alternative newspaper, named, appropriately enough, The Stranger . How strange is The Stranger ? It recently ran an article on Seattle’s six sexiest trees. The paper gave rise to the acerbic and hilarious Dan Savage and is the only media outlet I can think of that has promoted its book critic to the role of editor-in-chief. That, again, would be Chris Frizzelle, who describes his tenure as “the best job on the West Coast.” His reaction to the Occupy Seattle movement: “I will say this: The homeless have become travel hanging bag a lot more attractive.”
travel hanging bag Any visitor could tell you that Seattle is on the whole a welcoming, unpretentious city, but it is best to harness the town’s quirky (read: insane) residents to expose its nooks and crannies, not to mention sexiest trees. So for an entire week I handed myself over to Chris and Bethany Jean Clement, The Stranger ’s managing editor and food critic, travel hanging bag and to a small group of Seattle friends. We ate, we drank, we drank and ate, we scrambled all over town in a series of increasingly contentious cab rides, we read books, we looked at fish and clouds and did some other things that I can’t remember.
But did I mention that we read books? Seattle is home to the Elliott Bay Book Company, a legendary fixture of downtown’s Pioneer Square that recently relocated to Capitol Hill. The Book Company has hosted readings by anybody who’s anybody, from Seattle resident Sherman Alexie to gadfly Ralph Nader. But the best reading series in Seattle may not involve any writers at all. These are Chris’s travel hanging bag regular readings held at the historic Sorrento Hotel. No bearded poets mounting the podium here. People simply gather with their books and read. Kind of like your college library, except it is held in the Sorrento’s gorgeous travel hanging bag Fireside Room, replete with plush banquettes, an original fireplace, and, very much unlike your college library, an excellent selection of liquor. Passing through the sweet reverential quiet of people turning the pages of books and taking the occasional slurp of single-malt, I spot Moby Dick , Mary Karr, and Vladimir Nabokov, a heady selection, consumed by about 60 people travel hanging bag from young women in dreadlocks to walrus-mustached Kindle warriors. The hush, the gentle communion, along with the flicker of intent conversation, permeates the alcoholic glow of the room. These are some of the most attractive people I’ve seen in Seattle, and their noses are buried in books and booze. An intense young man flipping through a volume called Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable travel hanging bag Journey to the Heart of White America tells me, “I got it from the library!”
The Seattle Central Library of which he speaks is itself a wonder, one of the first significant buildings in the United States by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas. After a roll down First Hill from the Sorrento Hotel, I see Koolhaas’s library sparkling in the middle of the dull downtown core like a dark crystal. Set within the business district’s no-frills street grid, the library’s angled sheaths of glass skin conceal a chartreuse dream world of tomes, escalators, and reading spaces, the blue slivers of Elliott Bay peeking between the city’s towers. Looking out upon the water with a book in hand, one feels present inside travel hanging bag a giant hive mind, a perfect balance of the interior and exterior life that defines Seattle.
The next day, Chris and Bethany and I head to lunch at Café Presse, on Capitol Hill. Every neighborhood in the world should have a replica of the Presse. The décor is minimal Northwestern, travel hanging bag and Seattle’s cool kids are actually more like cool adults. The crowd here skews older than you would find in Brooklyn or in San Francisco’s Mission. The Caffé Vita brand café au lait is masterful. The sweet saffron-and-garlic soup is possibly as creamy as the aforementioned café au lait. “It’s one of my favorite things,” Bethany says of Café Presse’s travel hanging bag signature dish of two eggs broiled with ham and Gruyère. This is high praise from a foodie who described a side dish of fried green tomatoes at an overblown new downtown restaurant as “tasting like sand.” Bethany spent her formative years away from her hometown—Swarthmore, San Francisco twice, Prague. But she will always come back. As she puts it: “Two mountain ranges; two bodies of water; on a sunny day, it’s the most beautiful city in the world.” travel hanging bag Café Presse is effortlessly travel hanging bag cosmopolitan. It’s one of the few places in the neighborhood travel hanging bag where you can watch soccer games and, should the inexplicable travel hanging bag urge strike you, score fresh copies of Le Nouvel Observateur and Le Monde Diplomatique .
Under Bethany’s direction, I head for Seattle’s relatively tiny International District (née Chinatown) to check out a Vietnamese joint with the soothing name of Green Leaf. The restaurant’s interior is functional, but the duck-and-cabbage salad is a revelation, a magic mountain of cilantro, fresh and flavorful cabbage, and ginger sauce, all crowned with fatty ribbons of duck and pinches of fried onion and mint. The banh xeo crêpe filled with shrimp, pork, bean sprouts—each travel hanging bag taste vying for crazy supremacy—is travel hanging bag wrapped in a lettuce leaf and dipped into a tangy fish sauce. It’s a dish that could dissolve into a cesspool of grease, but instead travel hanging bag has strong flavor and good karma, not to mention a dessert-like sweetness that reminds me of Macao’s famous custard cakes.
For dinner, I join friends in Seattle’s current grungy (forgive me) neighborhood of the moment, the industrially deformed, airport-adjacent Georgetown. travel hanging bag Out here we find ourselves completely cut off from Capitol Hill’s fine selection of French newspapers, but beneath a freeway overpass we encounter another unlikely jewel, the charming Corson Building, a restaurant by the owner of Capitol Hill’s beloved Sitka Spruce. This former Italian stonemason’s house delights with a lion-faced fireplace, rustic communal tables, exposed brick, and the softest of autumnal candlelight. travel hanging bag The food is creatively travel hanging bag spectacular, marching right off the day’s menu and into your waiting mouth. On our visit we go ape over an elastic, complex geoduck, cured pork loin with green almonds still in their furry green skins, buttery morels, and Dungeness crab so fresh and true that, as far as I’m concerned, this dish alone makes living in the Pacific Northwest worthwhile.
We walk out of the restaurant’s fine vegetable garden, as bucolic as you can get for being pract