This article is classified "Real"
Native Life: Caffeine Junkies, Musicians, and Californians.
Seattle is one of the more hoopy places to visit, or when it comes to it, to
live in, explore, or get hit by a passing bus in, and compared to other
urban landscapes such as New York and Los Angeles, you can breath the air
without seriously needing a new set of lungs at the end of the day.
Features of Seattle:
1) Rain. It rains a bloody hell of a lot. If gray skies get you
down, you might as well start playing chicken with an Amtrak
and get it over with.
2) Trees are abundant. In many cities today, trees are stubby
shrubs with fairly thick stems; occasionally, the city planning
council goes really wild and decides that some place in the
city should have a lot of shrubs, and builds a park. Seattle
is different, being one of the few places where you have to
weed the sidewalk.
3) Coffee that will make a crackhead jittery, knock your blood
pressure several zillion times higher than it should be, and in
a pinch, will serve as an excellent insecticide. For some
reason, most of the Seattle natives will be hard up caffeine
addicts. Coffee is the staple food, economic commodity, and
drink of choice of the city. If you walk more than a block and
don't see an espresso stand, chances are, you're not in Seattle
anymore.
As it turns out, most immigrants to Seattle comprise not of Hispanic or
European origin, but rather are desperate refugees from California. Strangely
enough, many of these Californian immigrants get so pissed on the rain that
they decide to find out whether or not the guns, violence, smog, and awfully
nasty brown lawns they moved away from are really so bad after all. Most
decide that rain is far less fatal than Los Angeles, but the ones that stay
generally complain endlessly anyways, or start playing chicken with Amtrak.
The best way to alienate yourself in Seattle is to say you're from
California.
The best way to get to Seattle: Anything but Amtrak. It is cost effective,
but recently, you have to make a lot of stops on the way.