My idea of Seattle is it’s Vancouver but with more highways and more yoga. Not entirely untrue but grossly generalized. In this city, you can find the first Starbucks in the world, so we all have to thank this city I guess. I wasn’t sure if visiting America after Trump was elected is a good idea… but Seattle has always been a great city no matter who lead the country.

It was luckily not raining this long weekend when we decided to drive down to our American sibling city.  The wait at the border was 3.5 hours, so I was in the car for a good 7 hours by the time we got to Bellevue. The main purpose of this trips is clearly to shop at Uniqlo and Kinokuniya, which doesn’t exist in Vancouver (yet), so we made the most of it. I was very in awe of the huge highways and the sheer amount of traffic there is. Urban planners have cautioned us against building highway bypasses through cities for this reason.

We hit the city just around rush hour (4 pm) so we definitely did experience the commuting pain. Where are the bike lanes??? (says the person sitting in a car). Immediately after satisfying our shopping cravings, we headed to downtown Seattle for Kinokuniya. It’s located in a shopping plaza with other Japanese stores like Daiso.

After which, starving, we drove to Pike Place and tried to find a nice restaurant for dinner. My friend had recommended Japonessa, but the wait time was about 1.5 hours and we didn’t think we could last that long. So we walked around the block and found this huge restaurant called Wild Ginger.

I really liked the open space and the food! I got lamb chops that were delicious – but I’m not sure if it was because I was too hungry. After dinner we only had a small window of time to actually see Seattle, so we took a quick photo at Pike Place just so we can complete the tourist experience.

Till next time ‘Murica!