My Seattle impressions
Apparently, back in the Seventies, Seattle used to entice visitors by telling them: "You're gonna like it a lot".
Yes, I liked Seattle a lot. It is a special town with great scenery and a lovely coffee culture. Seattle natives, I sensed, are people who like the world beautiful and simple.
The Microsoft and Amazon gigantic success stories have no doubt validated the city's belief in itself as a world-class center of innovation and creativity. You cannot say these guys have low ambition. Why, look at Starbucks, they started from a lone shop in Pike Place Market. (Although Seattleites are not as particularly proud of Starbucks as they used to be.)
Jimi Hendrix, Ray Charles, Nirvana and the continuing vibrant music scene all say: "we get the space and time and audiences to experiment around here".
Here is a quote from Ray Charles: “I liked the atmosphere. The people were friendly, the people took to me right away. Seattle is the town where I made my first record. And if you ever want to say where I got my start, you have to say that".
Jerry Seinfeld said it was in Seattle he first bonded with an audience. "Seattle is my favorite city. It's the first place anyone ever liked me. When I played the Comedy Underground in 1983 I sold out a house for the very first time. That was really the beginning of everything for me. I feel like I owe my whole career to Seattle."
I am no international travel expert, but Seattle gives me a northern European vibe. Established Seattleites are mainly of that stock. Plus they are very liberal, and they have this mildly sarcastic, dark sense of humour; and they have some guardedness about them. (In other words, they are intelligent?)
Yes, Seattle weather is a weak point (I moan about London weather all the time). And, yes, it operates more like a town, less like a major city. But I think it wants to be that way. Half its residents escaped from California's Bay Area because it was getting too crowded for them.
With its hilly up-and-down roads, endless waterfront vistas, distant mountain backdrops, it is a town crying for more development, more beautification, in order to enter the world's list of most desirable cities. (Why look at Vancouver just a little up the road.)
Ah, but you see that's not what Seattleites want. They don't want to have to push through hundreds of tourists during lunchtime, they don't want property prices to skyrocket any higher. Clever people, Seattleites.
