Purple Haze, all in my eyes.

I didn’t stay long in Vancouver because I had to head south to Seattle. Why so soon? i hear you ask. Well i’m going to be honest, the reason was because I was meeting my girlfriend, Beth, who was flying out to Seattle to see me for just under two weeks.

Technically this is against the Pathfinder spirit, but here’s my attempt to publicly justify us meeting up. Firstly, the pathfinder award is for 6-10 weeks; not including the time Beth spends with me, I will have spent around 7 weeks alone in the US staying with hosts etc. Secondly, this is longer than some pathfinders are spending this yea – and have spent in the past – in the US continuously for the completion of their award. Thirdly, and most importantly, 9 weeks is a very long time to not see somebody you are in love with especially as traveling alone can be an extremely lonely affair – staying with Balliol hosts is great, but it’s not like being with somebody you actually know and have an established history and relationship with. So, erm, there is my excuse. I figure I don’t want to be dishonest about what I’m doing, so I thought I might as well be straight with anyone from college reading this. Furthermore, it means I can write accurate blog posts without having to omit an entire person from events!

Anyway, I took a bus down to Seattle to meet Beth. On the way I managed to endear myself to US Customs and Immigration once more, this time by forgetting to declare that I was bringing food over the border. What happened is that I filled out my customs form whilst waiting in Vancouver bus station, then got bored and went to buy some food – forgetting to alter said form where it said “are you bringing foods into the USA?” and i ticked “no”. Anyway, we get to border control and not only have I forgotten to tick “no” where it says “Are you traveling on business?” but when the guy asks me “are you carrying food?” and I (forgetfully but without intention to mislead) reply “no” it’s rather awkward when the other guy scanning my backpack says “so why have you got a sandwich in your bag?”; Apparently failure to disclose a restricted item at customs carries a fine of several thousand dollars – but luckily (and for the second time; perhaps word had been passed from New York) it was realised that I am in fact merely an idiot, and not a harmful idiot. So I got away with it.

So I make that Paul Sagar 2 – 0 US Customs and Immigration.

I got to Seattle around 4pm and spend 2 and a half hours in an internet cafe called Cyber Dogs messing around with photos whilst a 50 year old Italian emigree lady and I rocked out to Jimi Hendrix and The Rolling Stones and she told me about their 4th of July celebration, which involves "A British Invasion of Led Zepplin". Indeed, Seattle is where Jimi Hendrix is burried, and where both Nirvana and The Melvins are from. It has some serious rock history.

I took myself to the airport to first check into the nearby cheap motel, and then go and meet Beth, whose flight from JFK had been delayed by just 1 hour, a virtual miracle in contemporary domestic plane travel over here in America. Although we managed to walk past each other what must have been about 6 times in the ridiculous Sea-Tac airport arrivals section, we finally found each other and were both relieved that our mutual fears of planes falling out of the sky had once again not been vindicated.

The next day Beth and I took the bus to the house of Graham Cooper, a Balliol host in Seattle who had kindly agreed to let both Beth and I stay with him. Graham is probably the most diverse and eccentric character I have stayed with on my trip so far. After studying Chemistry at Balliol in the 1960s, and having knowing Howard Marks (the world-wide pot dealer turned celebrity show-off), he first became frustrated at employmeent prospects in the UK during the 1970s after a short term with Unilever, and decided to head west, where he landed a job in Silicon Valley during the real boom years when it was all taking off.

However, he confesses that he became rather disillusioned with that way of life, and with ‘9-5′ jobs in general, and so opted for a change. Specifically, after a trip to Australia and New Zealand he decided to join a yoga and meditation commune somewhere out in the mountains of western America (i’m not sure exactly where). He built his own hut in the fashion of Mongol nomad tents and spent several years as part of a commune, mostly meditating and living out of savings gleaned from Silicon Valley.

In the end, however, Graham felt he didn’t fit into that community as well as he’d have liked, and so he decided to leave. Finding an abandoned car in the woods, he patched it up with spare parts bought from local hillbillies, and headed west to Seattle, where he is living now (though possibly not for long). His house is unusual by American standards in that it has no air conditioning, and is really quite spartan. The kitchen contains no more and no less than is needed for healthy cooking, and Graham grows much of his own food in the back yard.

Indeed Graham has what can only be described as some eccentric views to accompany his somewhat eccentric lifestyle. Notably, he has a great deal of sympathy with the 9/11 Conspiracy theories, a point to which he returned to frequently in the first hour or two of our meeting him. Unfortunately, 9/11 Conspiracy is something of a bug-bear of mine, and I over-reacted a little in my disagreement with Graham’s arguments – but fortunately the damage was limited and reparable, and I don’t think there was any long-term damage. However I felt I’d kind of let myself down as a pathfinder and Balliol ambassador, and deserved the semi-ticking off I got from Beth about knowing better, and knowing that one shouldn’t behave as though one is an over-compensating 18 year old male in a first year PPE tutorial (a notoriously unpleasant display, of which I gave some of the most pronounced and which I still cringe in memory of).

Regardless, Beth and I took a nice walk around the neighbourhood – which, incidentally, is relatively poor and, you guessed it, predominantly black – and I found a discarded Washington state license plate, which I am keeping. That night Graham cooked cod and potatoes on a barbecue which was delicious, and we also drank some of his home-brewed beer which was (I must admit!) surprisingly good.

The next day Beth and I got up early to spend the day in Seattle. The weather in this part of the west coast is really odd, and indeed I had been warned about it earlier on my travels. Basically when you wake up it is freezing cold and and overcast. This lasts for most of the morning, but somewhere between 11am and 2pm the sun blasts away all the fog, cloud and cold, and it becomes roasting hot. It’s really very odd; in the morning Beth and I were freezing cold, wandering around wishing we hadn’t worn summer clothes, because the weather was all like this:

(This is the main entrance ot the world-famous Pike Street Market, along the Seattle Waterfront. It is filled with hundreds of stores, some of them selling useful things like dead fish, others not so useful thinks like multi-coloured 3ft Wigwams, or t-shirts with mis-spelled slogans. It’s rammed with people and quite fun because there are a lot of street traders and performers, including this man who had a fully trained parrot, which he threw from hand to hand, held upside down and terrified children with:)

but suddenly by 1.30pm it was blazing sunshine, meaning it was all like this:

(Yes, think of the impact you could make – perhaps to a child’s head? Is this what the Seattle authorities are getting at? But I worry somewhat; imagining what a child’s head would look like after you’d squashed it under the titanium wheels of your mega SUV might distract you from the road ahead, leading to precisely the impact one was attempting to avoid. Oh, the vicious, vicious irony…)

Beth and I took a walk around the Seattle Olympic Sculpture Garden in the North area, which was actually pretty cool and had some things like this in it:

On the left of this picture you can see the Seattle Space Needle, the famous building which dominates the skyline.

Here is me looking pensive upon a giant eye. This is very deep and meaningful, is this.

And here we have the official Seattle monument to paedophilia dedicated by the Intergenerational Sex Alliance of Washington State, which has a somewhat Freudian twist to it:

And here are some pictures of the Puget Sound, which is like a Norwegian fjord, but wider and not as deep and which Seattle sits upon one side of:

After a day’s wandering around doing as much free sight-seeing as possible (we’re both getting to be on tight budgets now, as i’ve managed to over-spend at a frankly incomprehensible rate, for which I still cannot fully account, and she is off to Kenya for two weeks after this trip!) we returned to Graham’s house for pizza. But not just any old pizza, no no! For Graham has built in his back yard his own "Cob" oven, a construction made of clay and mud. It is heated by lighting a fire directly inside the oven, which looks like this:

After 3 hours of letting the fire burn, you take out all the ashes and coals:

Then give it a mop:

And then put some pizzas in. When the oven is full of burning wood it is over 1000 degrees, and when the fire is removed it cools to around a mere 800. It will stay hot and then warm for 24 hours straight. The pizzas took 3 minutes to cook. In fact, the pizzas were really good and Graham made so much food we were able to save about 3 whole pizzas for the bus ride to Vancouver the next day.