Salon post: July 20

[jenett]

Welcome to this week's salon post!


Useful notes
Consider tracking this post to get notifications of new comments. Select the bell icon (or the words 'track this'). More help over here, and more about notifications in general here.

Comments are welcome whenever you get a chance - even if that's hours or days later. Feel free to jump into whatever sub-threads intrigue you. More discussion is the point of the salon posts!

Got a question you're trying to sort out, or a thing you'd like to discuss? Lots of thoughtful interesting people with a wide range of interests show up here! Feel free to ask about things you're thinking about or trying to solve, as well as other kinds of chat.
Note
I'm going to be out all day Friday and mostly not on a device that makes replies functional. Have fun, talk among yourselves, and I'll be around to comment either late Friday or more likely sometime on Saturday.

(My day involves a library, a museum, dinner out, and going to a performance. Busy me!)

Topic of the week
What things in your area are things you love showing off or introducing people to?

What I've been up to
I spent yesterday (and will be through next week) with a friend who's visiting from out of town. We have acquired a lobster roll, wandered a bit through Mount Auburn Cemetery, and discussed the habit of Bostonians to eat ice cream in all seasons, often at the drop of a hat.


House rules:
This is a public post, feel free to encourage other people to drop by, just note the 'if posting anonymously, include a name people can call you in responses' rule.

* Consider this a conversation in my living room, only with a lot more seating. I reserve the right to redirect, screen, and otherwise moderate stuff, but would vastly prefer not to have to.

* If you don't have a DW account or want to post anonymously, please include a name we can call you in this particular post. (You can say AnonymousOne or your favourite colour or whatever. Just something to help keep conversations clear.)

* If you've got a question or concern, feel free to PM me.

Comments

[anne]

*looks at job*

*looks at camera*


(and I wave at your friend because I bet I know them)

[jenett]

You do indeed know the friend! And yes, you do show off the city.

[anne]

So close and yet so far! Stupid job.

[madgastronomer]

I love to show off Pike Place Market, most especially the food. In a joke only one person has ever gotten, I refer to it as giving someone the Cook's Tour... partly because ideally, the tour includes shopping for a dinner I'll cook them later.

Gasworks Park is also most excellent. Plus the sights of Fremont -- Lenin, the Troll, the rocket, the Signpost at the Center of the Universe -- of course.

[jazzyjj]

I've been to that market. Definitely worth showing off to anyone who cares to see it! I have relatives in Redmond, which I believe is still Microsoft country.

[anne]

Seriously, one??

[madgastronomer]

Yep, just you. ETA: Or at least, you were the only one who ever acknowledged it.

Keeping Seattle in a thread

[ironymaiden]

The Market is a given. I especially like to buy a bag of Daily Dozen donuts to share. Folks who don't have an Asian community at home get hombow from Mee Sum. And then whatever fruit is in season.

I like to do big views at Kerry Park or Sunset Hill, and boat and wildlife watching at Ballard Locks/the salmon ladder. Sometimes the heron and falcon nests in Commodore Park.

Grownups get taken to a show at The Triple Door .

Twin Peaks fans get taken to Snoqualmie Falls.

[ckd]

You're friends with both jenett and anne, live here, and like many of the same places,..yet we haven't met? My usual Small World skill seems to have failed me, unless we've met and I just haven't linked you to your DW.

Other places I love to show off: Ballard (especially the locks, fish ladder, and botanical garden); the International District; Seattle Center, even as tourist focused as it is; and the main library.

[silveradept]

The Main branch is quite fun to behold, and enjoy greatly. The parking is a nightmare, if you are trying to get there in a hurry, or so I've found out.

[madgastronomer]

It's the parking that keeps me away from Main Branch.

[ckd]

Perfectly understandable. I don't own a car, so my parking worries are limited to the times when I need to find someplace to leave a car2go or ReachNow. (Which can be tough; I once tried to go to Cap Hill by car2go instead of transit. Bad move.)

[madgastronomer]

Yeah, I try never to go downtown or to Cap Hill by car. I'm lucky that my place is right by a direct bus down to the Link, so it's easy to get anyplace on the line.

[ckd]

I'm in Ballard, not that far from the Link station...that will exist in 20 years. (Or in another timeline, the subway station that's existed for 30 years. Sigh.) My bus options are "downtown" (the 40) or "the U" (44) - both eventually hit Link, but not quickly.

[madgastronomer]

I know Anne from fandom years ago, and Jennette through Anne. Most everyone who knows me in person knows this handle, though. Places you might have met me and not caught the handle include the restaurant I owned years ago, The Night Kitchen, and Sidhehaven.

[silveradept]

Is The Night Kitchen a Maurice Sendak reference?

[madgastronomer]

It is! And as homage, I had a friend design and paint a mural of the Seattle skyline doen in kitchen implements. I'll see if I can find a pic later when I'm awake.

[ckd]

Looks like we haven't met, then. I'm sure we'll fix the glitch sooner or later (especially if we can get anne out for another visit).

I only returned to the PNW in 2015 after many years in the Boston area, so it's not actually that surprising; it' s just that "surprise! small world!" situations seem to be so frequent in my life that the opposite now feels like the exception.

[silveradept]

Fremont is very definitely a place to go if you have someone who likes seeing more than the touristy things of Seattle. If I could ever get out times right during the Solstice Parade or other such fun, I'd have a blast with someone who enjoyed it.

I agree that Pike Place is a wonder to behold when in full swing.

[rmc28]

I like to show people the Corpus Clock. I used to also make a point of taking them to see the whale skeleton hanging outside the Zoology Museum - after an extensive refurbishment, it now hangs inside the museum which is probably better for preservation.

And although it is cliched and expensive to see King's College Chapel, it is also a really beautiful building. As a member of staff, I can usually get away with wandering confidently through various College grounds with a companion or two.

If I'm with someone who likes museums, then I am always up for a visit to the Fitzwilliam Museum. I think my favourite thing there is the Roman multitool. I also really like the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

If I'm with someone who likes walking then we can go along the Backs, and/or along the river past the parks and commons.

There's a bunch of foodie places to eat in Cambridge, but if I'm with someone who likes icecream I'll take them to the recently-opened Jack's Gelato parlour (they started off selling from a cargo bike, and once we got home-delivery ordered by my spouse via twitter, and it's expensive but really, really worth it).

[anne]

The Clock sounds familiar. Was there a book with the Clock in it, or am I dimly remembering a newspaper article about it?

[rmc28]

There was probably news coverage when it was unveiled about ten years ago.

[madgastronomer]

Having just watched this video:



I now want a swarm of Chronophages that look just like that to be the monsters in an episode of Doctor Who.

[madgastronomer]

And then I An Thing on Tumblr:

I now firmly believe that Chronovores are on a 17000 year dormancy cycle, and last time they hatched out they were eating all the time in the middle of a very busy urban are and everything started happening at once, and very sadly the 9th Doctor had to destroy them as mindless beasts (possibly being manipulated by someone else) but he kept this one as a scientific specimen. And also a bunch of eggs attached to a timer, so he can release a small number of them someplace safe next time around and they don’t go extinct.

[worlds_of_smoke]

Without a doubt, North Market. So. Much. Yummy.

[delight]

I live in NYC, so I try to not take people obvious places!

Like, if youwant to see the Statue of Liberty, you go ahead, but I am not going with you. I did that once when I was five, I'm good. Museums, I will go to whichever one people want because I have a Culturepass and can go to any museum I like, so if you have a type of exhibit you want to see I have a museum for you, but here are things I like to do:

The 'me' tour, for longtime friends or curious people - the neighborhoods I've lived in, places I like to eat best of all, etc. This includes Central Park and the Met, since that's the block I lived on as a kid. Now I live in the middle of nowhere in upper Manhattan, so the only thing we have there at all is a very large park, but we have Manhattan's largest and NYC's second largest dog park, so I think that's important.

Central Park by itself because it may be touristy, sure, but I take people to the little places that are relaxing and fun to chill in more than places with Historical Significance.

The High Line because it was important to my dad and we never got to go there together after the restoration so I go there and think about him.

Relatedly, Carl Schurz Park even for people not interested in 'where I grew up as a little kid,' but it's also beautiful and my father's memorial is there, so. Combined awesome stuff. I'm realizing I need a NYC Parks icon and I don't have one.

The various Greenmarkets - my favorite one is Union Square but it takes about an hour to get there from my apartment via public transit so depending on who I'm meeting and where, maybe not that one.

For dog fans, Boris and Horton (plus my dog). For cat fans, Koneko.

Also Apotheke because it's weird.

Mostly, though, it's "you pick a theme, I have a museum and can probably get one person besides me in free." If anyone in the comments is in need of a museum, please feel free to pick a theme ...

[redbird]

I lived in New York a long time; haven't lived in Boston long enough to have more than one visitor to show around, so I will talk about New York.

Once in a while the out-of-town visitors wanted to go to something that never occurred to me, or that was relatively new and I hadn't visited until they suggested it. I took a British visitor to both the Fraunces Tavern Museum (which treats George Washington rather like a saint whose minor relics they are fortunate enough to have) and Ellis Island, shortly after the latter was massively refurbished and opened as a museum with easy ferry service from South Ferry.

I was also always happy to take people to either the Bronx Zoo or the Museum of Natural History—those are the two institutions we had memberships in, because I and/or cattitude wanted to go there often enough that it made sense.

[pameladean]

Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden! Minnehaha Falls!

Also the Art Institute. (People who want to go to the Walker can go by themselves.) The sculpture garden is okay if people want to see it, and I actually like the blue chicken, but I'm annoyed they took down the little conservatory there. Oh, and the Museum of Russian Art has some amazing landscapes and is in a gorgeous building.

The Como Park Conservatory is a good place to go. Also the AIDS memorial garden in Loring Park.

And our very local baker, Butter, is actually a fine place to hang out and get over-caffeinated. Blackbird is often very good, though the way they switch up the menus means I can't always eat there. Tiny Diner is more reliable for me than Blackbird, and they have a beautiful vegetable garden.

P.

P.

[silveradept]

A lot of things the region is famous for is about an hour's drive and searching for parking away (and has been covered by other commenters), but the Museum District is pretty neat, with Art, Glass, Lemay Car, Washington state history, and the Foss Waterway museum all within a catapult's range of each other (and many of them free of you have a local that can snag a museum pass from their local library before the visit).

There's also a throwback arcade (Dorky's) for those looking for coin-op from their youth, and a really good example of making a green-looking college campus taken in the middle of a downtown area with UW-T

If it's fair season, the Washington State Fair in Puyallup is a big draw of people and very neat things, at the cost of walking everywhere and the like, and WSU had a Master Gardener's program and annex in Puyallup.

Ice Cream Social is great, and 6th Avenue is the drag, with costume rental and plenty of other shops of interest (Cresent Moon and the Nearsighted Narwhal, among others), and there's more of the "arcade full of shops jammed next to each other" feel in Freighthouse Square, which hosts a Fairy Festival every year.

So there's plenty to do, depending on what time of the year it is, including the roller coaster and water park in Auburn, but I'm close enough to Seattle that the really famous things are all there.

[ckd]

I personally prefer Point Defiance Zoo in Tacoma to Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle, also.

[silveradept]

The gardens around the zoo are also pretty to behold, when everything is in bloom. The Zen Garden works regardless of whether there are blooms.

[jazzyjj]

I'm spending the weekend at my parents' place. Yesterday was my dad's birthday, and 2 of his siblings have birthdays this month so they all came up here from Southern Illinois and various other places. One of my cousins is here too. Yesterday they all went to the Cubs/Cardinals game, and my dad showed them around Chicago a bit. I like to go sightseeing, even though most of the time I cannot appreciate everything due to my visual impairment. But it's always so much fun to take in all the other senses. I've been to shows with live audio description, and touch tours prior to every show where I got a hands-on look at the stage props. The stage is also described in vivid detail. There's at least one theater here that does this, and the others are quickly coming on board.