Travelogue, part 1 of ?

[maradydd]

Obviously, I've been doing a lot of travelling lately, and I've been remiss in keeping you, my Faithful Readers, apprised of just what I've been doing with myself. Now that the CodeCon presentation is over and I've dropped one of my classes, I actually have a little bit of Copious Free Time, so -- on with the story!


Microsoft scheduled the interview for a Monday, but were willing to pay for up to three nights' stay, so of course I leaped at the opportunity to spend a weekend in Seattle. The flight out was uneventful, and I got a lot of knitting done. All flights should be this utterly dull; I've had my life's fill of stressful, mis-scheduled, oh-we-don't-care-that-you're-travelling-together-we're-going-to-seat-you-half-the-plane-apart airline idiocy, thanks.

Corporate travel coordinators make it their life's work to make your travel as painless as possible, and Microsoft's know how to do their jobs. Getting my rental car and finding my hotel were ridiculously simple thanks to the directions they'd provided; along the way, I phoned turgon76 and Lucy to let them know I was in town. Andy wasn't at home, but Lucy was, and we made plans for dinner with Revi Sterling, who had introduced us at last year's CRA-W Graduate Cohort, for Monday night.

After I got to the hotel, a bog-standard boxy corporate affair, I spent about half an hour unwinding and taking care of various correspondence, then got pounced by cloakedwraith. I was really looking forward to the chance to spend some time with him under more auspicious circumstances than the last time I'd seen him, which was about nine months prior in Chicago around midnight when I was on my way back from the SWARM workshop. About then, it occurred to me that, per my tendency to eat late dinners, he'd made reservations for 7pm ... which, according to my stomach, was actually 9pm. And I hadn't had a proper lunch. So, he got the reservation pushed up as far as possible, we decided to spend the late-afternoon bumming around Bellevue, and he showed up about half an hour later. In the interim, a maintenance drone showed up intending to replace a filter in the air conditioning unit, and in doing so, let an astonishing number of small fluttering insects into the room. Fortunately, they all departed by the time cloakedwraith arrived.

By this point it was around three, so we hopped in my rental car and departed in quest of a coffeeshop. This is, of course, the Seattle area, so coffeeshops abound, but since we were out of cloakedwraith's neck of the woods and I didn't know the area at all, nor did we have access to his way-cool in-car GPS -- more of which later -- we ended up at a Starbucks. Big surprise. (Oh, and before we actually got to the coffeeshop, we swung by his office, but didn't go in.) I introduced him to the horror that is Chantico (the dark, bitter chocolate drink that is the distilled essence of Leonard Cohen's voice), and then we repaired to a grocery store to pick up some samples of local microbrews. We ended up with an IPA from Oregon, the brewery name of which I have since forgotten, and a bag of salt-and-vinegar chips, and then headed back to my box-away-from-home. We cracked a couple of the beers and kicked back to chat about the interview, what I could expect, what the greater-Seattle area was like, &c. Around six, I decided it was time to get changed for dinner, and in the process ended up showing cloakedwraith how to iron pants. Suitably attired for a Zagat-rated restaurant, we opted for his car this time, since he'd already programmed the restaurant's location into it.

About the GPS unit I have this to say: squee! Yes, yes, I know I shouldn't be quite so excited about something that's basically just Mapquest in realtime, especially since I know exactly what sorts of algorithms go into Mapquest, but dammit, it is just neat as hell to watch a little colour LCD map updating itself as you drive. Even if some of the audio directions are so ill-informed as to drive you straight into a dead-end because two roads under construction don't connect, and even if it sometimes interprets a bend in the road that you'd have to follow anyway as a "turn". Yeah, yeah, it's that last two percent of correctness that makes all the difference between frustrating and indispensible -- the uncanny valley of user interface design, I suppose, and more on "the uncanny valley of $field_that_isn't_robotics" when I talk about the SF trip -- but I'm confident we'll get there.

Just, I suppose, as we got to Nishino. I'd had sushi in Seattle once before, so I knew just how fresh and tasty it tended to be, but wow, Nishino completely blew away my expectations. As cristalia puts it, this was out-and-out foodporn. We started with a chu toro tartare, minced fine, which we ate with chopsticks even though we probably weren't supposed to. Dinner itself was a selection of sushi, including sea bass, salmon, tuna, sea urchin, shrimp, octopus, yellowtail, and I seem to recall red snapper. I also scored points with the waitress for my Japanese pronunciation (which I still think is shit, but I'll take compliments where I can get 'em) and for asking for the misoshiru along with the sushi; she thought I'd lived in Japan, as apparently they do that there. (Nope, but maybe at some point.) I don't know what they'd done to the rice, but there was something more complex to the flavour than just your standard sugar-and-vinegar tang, and the fish was of course it-was-alive-a-few-hours-ago fresh. For dessert, we had ice cream wrapped in mochi, something I've had before but which was new to cloakedwraith, and by that point we were both so amazed by the sheer luxury of it all that we were both pretty much speechless.

There wasn't much more to that night. We returned to the hotel, cloakedwraith bid me goodnight, and I slept like the dead.


Days 2-4 to follow.