EMP Museum

Reporting for duty on day 1/30 of my September blog challenge! After I made this ridiculous promise to myself I got a little worried that I would run out of topics. I started jotting down ideas on a piece of paper, and was surprised to have come up with at least 25. I have also enlisted by best friend to keep me accountable. It’s good to have both a plan and someone to judge you when you want to reach a creative goal.

On to the color story! I was fortunate to have acquired a day pass to Bumbershoot 2014 in Seattle through my boyfriend who was performing in one of the comedic acts. After he finished his show in the early afternoon, we had the rest of the day to eat deep fried food and watch the other performers. We stayed the rest of the weekend to walk around and be tourists for a couple of days.

Aimee Mann at Bumbershoot 2014

Pike Place Market

My two favorite things to do when I travel are wander around on foot and take photos of beautiful things. I love to set out an intention of what kind of photos I will gather at the start of a trip. This is especially fun for long term trips because it becomes a sort of scavenger hunt. A few of the photo themes I’ve explored in the past have been feet photos, reflections and typography. A couple of fun themes I’ve come across are Jessica Swift’s cats of Morocco and Lisa Congdon’s blue doors. If you’re interested in exploring your own theme, here is a great list of ideas at WORLDROMPER blog.

For this short trip, I decided to focus on color and street art. It’s amazing how color pops out at you once you decide to look for it. I’ll be sharing the street art photos in a later post. Here are some of my favorite places from this weekend.

01. EMP Museum: A museum dedicated to music, pop culture and science fiction. Awesome combo. First off, the architecture by Frank Gehry is out of this world. Twisting and turning forms of sheet metal in impossibly beautiful colors. I could stare at the building forever. Inside, the exhibits were beautifully designed. I really enjoyed the Fantasy: Worlds of Myth and Magic exhibit.
02. Gum Wall: Exactly what it sounds like. Gross + beautiful, with a little bit of smelly on the side. To get to it, walk up to the main entrance to Pike Place Market and to the left, you take a staircase down to Post Alley.
03. The Five Point Cafe: Super nice servers and hostess, awesome neon signs and really great pie. We had a piece of plum blackberry pie. The server said that one of the servers makes the pie, and that they are vegan, which was super surprising because the crust was really buttery tasting.
04. The Hurricane Cafe: Diner food. The onion rings were perfect.
05. Pike Place Market: I know putting Pike Place Market on a travel list is about as obvious as the Space Needle, but my tip here is to GO EARLY. Which is also sort of “duh” advice, but as a late rising traveler, I had never done this before and I was so pleased with the experience. Usually in the summer the market is so crowded with tourists taking photos (myself included) that it’s difficult to push your way through to the vendors to actually buy anything. We arrived at around 8:45 a.m. as the vendors were setting up and it seemed nearly empty. We were able to get breakfast with no wait at a table with a view of the water. After we were finished, the market was still not very crowded, and very enjoyable to walk around.

Let me know if the comments if you have any travel tips for Seattle for our next visit. More tomorrow on day 2/30 of my September blog challenge! Bye for now!