Here’s a more detailed account of our trip to Seattle.

We arrived in Seattle Friday afternoon, January 19. Not long after we checked into our hotel, we went to the convention center to complete our registration for the ALA Midwinter meeting. That evening, we went out to dinner and then met up with E, one of Bryan’s friends from grad school. I’d never met her and it’s always so wondeful to meet people that Bryan was friends with in grad school. She took us to University Hill and we had tea at the Grand Illusion which has a cute little coffee shop attached to it. We were both exhausted after a long day of traveling, but had to get a photo with E.

Saturday, we explored the exhibits at ALA in the morning. When I saw the Baker & Taylor cats, I had to get a photo with them. We also had our photo taken for our own Read poster. Going through all of the exhibits was a blast. So many free things that I would have liked to have taken but there just wasn’t the room in my suitcase. I did manage to take several young adult novels and a few graphic novels. I’ve already finished several of the items that I picked up. Saturday afternoon, we attended some committee meetings on a few topics. I was interested in a young adult discussion about books for reluctant readers. What I didn’t realize is that the committee was going to be discussing books to create a list of the top 10 books for reluctant young adult readers. I hadn’t read any of the books, so the discussion was interesting but probably would have been more interesting to me if I had read some of the books. That evening we went out with Shirin, a collage artist that Bryan has admired and corresponded with for a while, and her husband. They took us to Mama’s Mexican restaurant, which is a great local place. After dinner, we went to Shirin’s studio and Bryan was in complete awe. Someday he’ll have a studio too, I hope. Then we walked a bit around downtown Seattle and then went for tea. Unfortunately, we didn’t have our camera with us the night we went out with Shirin and her husband.

Sunday, we took our time getting around in morning. That afternoon, I attended the President’s Lecture where Deena Ebbert talked about the Pike Place Fish Company’s “Fish” Philosophy, while Bryan went to a discussion group. For dinner, E and N picked us up and took us to a Thai restaurant in the Fremont neighborhood (The Center of the Universe). After dinner they showed us around Fremont, where we saw the huge Lenin statue, the rocket and the Fremont Troll. The Troll is so interesting, it’s under a bridge and under his left hand is an old VW beetle that is a time capsule. Then they took us to the Capitol Hill neighborhood and we drove by the apartment building that was the setting for the movie Singles.
Monday was our day to just wander downtown Seattle. We went to the Seattle Public Library for most of the morning. We took a tour of the library and just wandered around. It’s a new library that has received a lot of press. While we were wandering around, we had mixed feelings about the place. There is a lot of open space but not really any nooks to curl up with a book and definitely no comfortable chairs to sit in. The chairs that they have reminded me of cheap chairs from IKEA that aren’t comfortable to sit in, after a year and a half of being open the chairs were starting to show a lot of wear. The spiral where they keep all of the non-fiction is a really interesting idea but when there is no other way to go down except by elevator, it’s a bit annoying. Of course, we looked at the library in a more critical way than most patrons would but I’m so glad we visited. I was really impressed with the fact that they have an area just for teenagers with computers for the teens. Being interested in young adult librarianship, I’m always interested in what space the libraries have for teens. If you’re in Seattle, the library is definitely worth stopping and seeing. (More library photos are on my flickr page here.)
After the library, we headed to Palba Indian Restaurant for some wonderful Indian food and then to the Pike Place Market. I mainly wanted to see the Pike Place Fish Company, even before I saw the ALA President’s Lecture guest. We’d hoped to see some flying fish but it was a slow day and were only treated to some mussels flying in a bag to the counter. We also wandered around the rest of the market and Bryan bought a wallet. What an amazing market with so many fruit and vegetable stands, we could definitely do all of our produce shopping there. It’s like our local farmer’s market times ten, it was amazing and so tempting to buy a lot of the colorful fruits and veggies.

Monday night we had a light dinner, since we’d stuffed ourselves silly at the Indian buffet for lunch and went back to the hotel to get ready to head home on Tuesday.

Tuesday was our long day of traveling, but we made it home safely.