Jagged Edges of the Geographic Puzzle

Today I traveled to the elaborate and serious urban landscape of Seattle. It lines up perfectly with the Puget Sound.

Rugged; Unorganized; Messy

Jagged.

The whole city was under construction, billowing out its reverse beeps and diesel laden construction prowess. Ever updating. Ever under improvement.

The view from coming in from Interstate 5 is amazing in it's own right. In the middle of morning rush hour, a orange haze hangs over the city with it's two stadiums and massive ports lining the water to the west. The Space Needle rises ever so slightly to the east, with no clear boundary of a shoreline or growth.

This is a different kind of Sound. Not one of natural beauty, but of churning productivity. Seattle is a place where you walk up and down the street, and people simply have a mystery to them that makes you want to ask more. The city is grown up. Established. Diverse.

So diverse! The amount of difference in the place amazed me! I don't think I've ever seen such a concentrated population of Asian heritage Americans! They were everywhere! I could literally read the history of the city as I walked around, and what I found was a mixture of ethnicities I have never even fathomed.

The geography of the Seattle metro area literally matches it's character. The city is so oddly shaped. It's flanked on either side by water with a clear discernible encapsulation of land upon the opposite shore, yet the hills within the city yield neighborhoods, not apartment blocks. There is a fishing village quaintness to East Seattle. As the conjoined buses clank down the floating bridges of Interstate 90 and State Route 520, a quaint set of houses appear in the distance with their boats moored on Lake Washington.

The city also has strangely laid out streets. The numbered parallel the water front, instead of the named streets. Also, the Alaskan Way Viaduct dominates over the waterfront park, and being the one of the many prides of the Seattle landscape, was also filled to the brim with rush hour traffic. The wires above the many paths for cars instead carry electrified buses, and weave on top of the underground transit tunnels where both trains and shuttles run.

Being in classic tourist fashion, I did not see the Space Needle or the first Starbucks, or Pike Place for that matter. I not only don't flock to the main points when I first get there, but I simply have the time to do so. Instead, I oped for a local Italian Pizza Place, which had what looked like a man with Asian heritage serving.

Cities are a magical place, where mixture and condensation of culture precipitate onto a world stage. I just never realized with what different fluids one can mix with, and with what patterns one can make with them.