Welcome!

Seattle: city of coffee and Kurt Cobain, famous for sleeplessness and a sixties space needle - oh, and a disproportionate degree of rain. Having lived here a while, I think it's high time to communicate a few further things about this city to my friends on the other side of the world, to give a better impression of what it's like here, and to prove that there's more to Seattle than Starbucks and Microsoft.

To give an idea of what I might touch on, and why I like it here, this is a place where the plight of the killer whale pods in Puget Sound makes front page news. Where people really care about what's happening to the spotted owl as old growth forest is destroyed. Where there's a troll under a bridge, a rocket erupting from a house, and an enormous statue of Lenin that someone bought on a whim and has been unable to get rid of, all within a few blocks. Where there's a sailing race called the Duck Dodge, a music museum in what appears to be a crash-landed psychedelically colored spaceship, and a vast number of bookshop-dwelling cats.

This is a city from which, on a clear day, you can see two mountain ranges and a volcano. The city curls between and around two large lakes, a bay, a canal and Puget Sound itself, making it kind of a large-scale west-coast American Venice, if you can imagine such a thing. Its population is famous for having more dogs than children, and for wearing fleece on a semi-constant basis (both facts do indeed seem to be true).

In short, it is wonderfully idiosyncratic, socially and environmentally conscientious and, in many and often unexpected ways, beautiful. I hope I can share some of this with you here.