I'm presently[
*] in a plane, 30,000 feet over Portland, Oregon. I've just taken off from Seattle on my way to San Francisco, where I have an 8 hour layover, then an 11 hour flight back to London. Obviously, this is less than ideal, but c'est la vie. It's also less than ideal that my departure was at 6am, which meant I had to be up at 4am. It also means that my window seat has a lovely view over black - the sun isn't up yet. That said, it's pretty overcast outside anyway, so I'm not sure I'd get to see a great deal of the Pacific coast anyway. If I look out the windows on the other (Eastern) side of the plane, I can see some lovely salmon pink sunrise over the top of the clouds.
In case you're wondering how I'm sending this email from a plane, Virgin America has free Wifi onboard (it happens to be sponsored by Google somehow). This is complete genius on Virgin America's part. Whenever I have to fly within the US (admittedly, not often), I will be flying Virgin. They not only have great service and facilities, but the interiors of their plance look way cool, with purple lights, black leather, and lots of shiny white plastic.
Ooh, I can see some lights outside, peeking through the cloud cover below. Judging from the inflight map (which is Google maps), it's Salem, Oregon. I'm hoping the clouds will clear ass the sun comes up, and I'll get a nice view of San Francisco bay and the Golden Gate bridge. On the way up to Seattle, I was on the wrong side of the plane, and only saw the queues of commuters coming in from Oakland.
Anyway, while I'm missing my beautiful wife (two weeks is far too long), and am really looking forward to meeting her in Paddington station tomorrow (we cross over there as she heads to an interview and I head home), I've had a pretty good time over here. Mountain View and San Francisco were pretty familiar. Highlights were driving a hybrid Toyota Prius (the engine starts and stops somewhat randomly, which can be disconcerting at traffic lights), and some of the stuff we did at GooCamp (it's an unconference, meaning a conference with no set agenda and no presenters or speakers, just people and rooms and the opportunity to talk about pretty much anything for two days).
I also caught up with a few friends, saw
This Is It, the Michael Jackson movie (don't bother - I was given a free ticket, and it wasn't worth it), ate lots of delicious steak, drove to some mountains overlooking the Valley and visited the
Apple Campus at 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino. Nothing special, but significant somehow. While I was working at KPMG, and we had a lot of Macs, whenever you booted up a new Mac, the timezone would be set to "Cupertino". It's just a regular Silicon Valley city, which means that it's a giant housing estate - think Reynella, but on a gigantic scale.
Seattle was new to me - I visited the office here for two days, then spent one extra day (Saturday) exploring the city. It being the home of Starbucks and Microsoft (as well as Amazon and Boeing), I had to make a pilgrimage or two. So, I hired a car for a day (I love Zipcar - I can hire a car by the hour all over the US), and drove to:
15th Avenue Coffee & Tea - Starbucks' new "unbranded" coffee shop, where they're testing out things like coffee tasting sessions (which I happened to be there for - it was interesting, but the coffee wasn't that good - too watery). It struck me as a very upmarket starbucks, with a very stylised "independant" look to it. I suspect they won't be as profitable as the normal Starbucks are.
Bill Gates' House - well, as I was growing up, through high school and university, he was building it, so it's always been stuck in my mind as something I wanted to see. As you would expect, there's nothing to see. It looks like
this. Disappointingly, Bill wasn't expecting me, and didn't invite me in to hear my views on the world.
Microsoft Campus, 1 Microsoft Way, Redmond - again, very significant as I was growing up. "Redmond" has always been a location I've wanted to visit, just to see where Microsoft comes from. It's bascially a big office park, with lots of buildings. It's kinda like the Google campus, but with boring signage (that said, Google's signage isn't exactly exciting).
Pike Place Market - A market in Seattle, where they allegedly throw fish. I didn't see any fish throwing, but did have a really nice halibut sandwich. I also visited the original Starbucks there. I'm not actually a huge Starbucks fan, to be honest, but in England, their coffee is among the better coffee you can get, and Seattle is their hometown, after all!
The Seattle Space Needle - This is
the landmark of Seattle. It's just a big tower with a revolving restaurant at the top. I had dinner there last night - I wasn't expecting to, but I did on the spur of the moment, and they happened to have a spare table for one. Great views over Seattle, really nice food (I had Clam Chowder and Alaskan Sablefish). I also went on the monorail to get there.
I also took some photos from a viewpoint, and generally enjoyed myself, though wished I could share it with Polina. Particularly the Space Needle. There was a couple who got engaged up there who were with me in the lift on the way down. :-)
OK, they've turned on the seatbelt sign, which means I need to shut down. The sun is up, but the clouds are out. Goodbye, love you all!
[
*] Well, I was at the time of writing, and sending this as an email to my family, but then I resposted this to the blog while on the ground in London. So it's kinda true in principle, but technically a lie that I sent this blog post from a plane.
Posts
