Sunday, February 10, 2008

My trip to US of A (part 2)

Yesterday was pretty interesting.. Well I am still severely jet lagged.. I woke up at 3.30 in the morning again, extremely hungry.. We finally left the hotel at around 11.30. The hotel has free drops to many locations and one of them is Seattle center.
I. Our first stop was Seattle space needle center. The building is 500+ feet high. This is a tall thin structure and on top, is a view deck. Below the view is a revolving restaurant. The elevator takes you up to the deck at a speed of 10miles/hour. The elevator is glass fenced allowing people to see outside as they travel up or down. With every passing second up, the view becomes better. From the deck, the view was magnificent, and one can spot all the important places in Seattle downtown, if not with the naked eye, through binoculars. The temperature was pretty low and there was gusty cold winds, that forced us to retrace our steps back to the elevator. Certainly worth a trip.

II. Second stop was a sci-fi museum and music museum. I am not sci-fi person. If you ignore border line horrible sci-fi movies, the only sci-fi movie that I have seen is Starwars. So a person who is more into sci-fi movies and books would be able to appreciate the place much better. The one thing that interested me here is a video, that talks about how the weird space capsules in movies were made. The molten glass is knead at high temperatures into the interesting shapes, that one sees in movies. What is interesting is:
a. The tools used to cast the glass in different interesting shapes.
b. The final product is extremely small(maximum 1 cubic feet) that are magnified to be shown as huge space shuttle, stars and planets.
The music museum again was something that I could not do justice too. My interest in hip hop, classic or any western music is extremely limited and hence was not able to appreciate the place.

IV. Our next stop was IMAX theater. IMAX theater has been on my list for quite sometime now. There are very few of this kind in India, one of them being Hyderabad. We almost made it to the theater, in a college trip, when a few severely disoriented people wanted to eat hyderabad biriyani, instead of sneaking out of the hotel and catching a show. Sad. I never got over this serious let down. Anyways, the movie that was being shown yesterday was not a 3D picture and hence it is as good as watching an ordinary movie and extremely large screen.

III. The coastline near the Seattle center is interesting. The coastline is riddled with boats some pretty.. some not so pretty. After a couple of minutes here, we headed towards Pike Place market on foot.

IV. The most interesting place in the Pike place market is probably a shop that sells fish. When people buy fish from here, the undressed huge fish certainly weighing a kilo or two is thrown at the customer. The men at the shop and the crowd cheered a woman who bought a fish (dunno wat kind that was). A fish weighing easily two kilos was thrown. She did a decent job catching it mid air and everyone cheered.
Finally we headed back home tired.

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