Just a few weeks ago I made one of the biggest hedges I've made in my entire life. I decided to quit my job as senior manager of a small text mining company in San Diego, move out of my house, leave my friends and relatives, and move all the way up to Seattle where I know hardly anyone and work as a machine learning scientist at Amazon. What I find particularly surprising about the whole experience is how rapidly I've adjusted to my new surroundings.
For example, the whole process of moving one's self, wife, child and belongings thousands of miles north seemed to have gone by in a heartbeat. My new digs with views of the Seattle skyline and overlooking the Puget sound seems to have already lost its sense of newness without diminishing how exhilirating it is to see the barges shipping thousands of tons of goods in and out of the harbor, the ferries taking passengers to and from all of the islands in the sound, and all the other boats leisurely meandering this way and that.
Although it's only been a few weeks, somehow it feels like I've been walking a few blocks to Pike's market for years to pick up some of the spectacular culinary delights offered there whether it be a mouth-watering piroshki and borscht soup for $5 from the Russian bakery, Piroshki Piroshki, or one of Uli's famous sausage sandwiches for $6, or a baguette and cheese from Beecher's Handmade Cheese where you can watch the cheese being made the old fashioned way right there in the store.
Even though I heard about the extremely high percentage of bookstores and coffee shops in Seattle, I never imagined seeing so many pubs, bars, and restaurants with a literary theme. I'm thinking of places like Library Bistro, Bookstore Bar, and the antique bookstore in Pike's market, whose name I cannot recall, with a full bar that is open on weekend evenings. But now that I have, it's all seems like part of the normal fabric of life in Seattle.
And when I take the ten minute bus ride to my office at Union Square in the international district of Seattle and people other than low income workers ride the bus, not only does it feel refreshing that public transportation is not stigmatized the way it is in San Diego, but it feels like this is how I've been commuting for years.
I certainly never thought the time would come that I would have gear for different kinds of rain. But now that I have my thick down jacket, my lightweight Goretex jacket, and all the other gear that I do, nothing seems out of the ordinary. When I walk outside, the cold November wind that streaks against my face and the light drizzle that sometimes beats against my head feels like it's been blowing and beating like that for time eternal.
I think part of the reason I've been able to adapt so quickly to my new surroundings is that all of the experiences that I'm having as a new Seattelite are not really all that new. Between the long stretches of time that I've spent in various cities and countries, with their own climates, cultures, and ways of life, in one way or another I've experienced it all before, perhaps not exactly the same but close enough to it that my brain is able to recall what it was like and thereby lessen the sense of surprise and sometimes shock. This isn't to say that there is nothing new to experience here in Seattle. Quite to the contrary. Every day feels like a new adventure where my brain is constantly overwhelmed by all of the familiar patterns.
I sometimes joke that Portland is my new TJ, Vancouver is my new LA, and Montana is my new Arizona, part of which is to say you have to like water to live up here. Actually it's also partly a boast since I'd choose Portland over TJ and Vancouver over LA any day. I've been in Seattle for just over a few weeks now and despite the rainy weather I think I am happier here than I've ever been since living in Paris in my early twenties or Germany in my middle teens. Part of it's the adventure. But also part of it is that Seattle really is a spectacular city. In fact, I've come to realize that it's Seattle's rain that not only keeps everything a lush green but also acts a sort of gatekeeper keeping those afraid to to get a little wet from being able to enjoy all that Seattle has to offer. And should the secret ever get out, that it doesn't actually rain as much, at least in total rainfall, as most people might imagine, I suspect the barbarians would be at the gates and all the empires, be they culinary, musical, literary, or outdoors, would start to crumble. So when I read a Seattle blog talking how about the supposed real estate bubble in Seattle, specifically how absurd the growth rate has been in real estate here over the last few years rising as high as the low teens, in terms of the year-over-year median sales price , rather than dismiss the outcry, having lived in San Diego where growth in the mid to low twenties was the norm for a good half-decade and housing prices are about 40% more expensive than they are here, I find myself in complete solidarity.
