More Comparisons

Getting back to SF vs. Sea comparisons

Attended NAAAP http://www.facebook.com/#!/group.php?gid=2655752138&ref=ts social mixer last month and helped out to clean up Chinatown in downtown Seattle. Turns out every month they have a mixer and they have a Chinatown cleanup sort of thing (I think). This was the second time in as many months I volunteered to clean Chinatown's streets. The people here are so much nicer and down to earth compared to San Franciscans it's not even funny. The difference is very VERY palpable.

So the last social mixer was in Bellevue at a Korean restaurant called 2AM. If you name a restaurant the worst thing you can do is give it a generic name like 2am because you just killed any chance of finding your restaurant easily on the web. Do a search on Google for "2am restaurant" and you'll get a listing of restaurants open until 2am in San Jose as your first search option.

Anyways, judging purely from body language and blatant stares from attractive females, I'd say the girls here are just as hungry for attention as the guys. I've never been looked over by so many females in my entire life in one night. I didn't meet any single girls on this night, but I still found the experience very enriching and enjoyable and I was the very last person to leave.

I'm actually truly looking forward to the next social mixer in May. I've actually built up a little bit of confidence living here in Seattle area. Yesterday I went hiking to Serene Lake: http://www.wta.org/go-hiking/hikes/lake-serene

It's a very steep but rewarding hike. I went with a group that I met on Meetup.com. The leader was Jewel, a woman with two kids and a dog. Unfortunately our group was so fragmented I wound up hiking with Jewel and her kids (and dog) pretty much by ourselves the entire time. Everyone else went in front of us. We were the last ones down by a good 40 minutes.

I did get some nice shots of the Lake. It was all iced over so it wasn't the beautiful blue emerald color it should have been, but you could see little places here and there where the water was in fact blue in color where the ice melted away. There were little avalanches happening all during our hike. They sounded like gun fire or firecrackers in a row. "Pop", "pop", "pop", they would go. Little bits of rock and ice tumbling down the tall, almost sheer cliff. The place was very tranquil and peaceful. There was still quite a bit of snow at the top.

I wish I had brought my spikes (metal shoe clipons) so I could navigate over the ice without fear of slipping. I had purchased these spikes because it seems there is a lot of snow up in the hills of Seattle's backcountry. They are almost a necessity if you hike in April in the higher elevations. I'm actually starting to get comfortable hiking in the snow after brutal Mailbox peak. I'll never forget that hike, so steep and so icy, and crazy.

I'll try to get our leader to goto Ape Cave next time. It's a 3 mile long lava tube that takes 2 1/2 hours to get to. It's near Mt St Helens. It's a tourist attraction so it's not too dangerous but you do have to watch your step. Basically Ape Cave is a lava tube that formed a long long time ago during an eruption. Somehow the cave maintained it's shape and people like to explore it's long, dark, creepy innards.