The Canadian Adventure

Part 6 - 12th December 1996

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I'm sitting at home typing this mail message in the comfort of my own home. Unfortunately I still haven't got the Internet connection on my own machine fixed yet, so I'll have to resort to the positively Neolithic method of transporting it to work tomorrow using a floppy disk. You remember those - they were what we used in the days before penicillin and flush toilets.

Flush toilets are going to be the centre piece of this mail I'm afraid. The reason is simple: four of us spent the weekend in Seattle, and toilets and Seattle are fundamentally joined. In fact, according to the history books the current state of the place is the direct result of matters lavatorial.

(An interjection at this point. Checking back through my old emails while I was creating this site, this was the first mention of Eve. She became increasingly significant - so much so that we now share the same surname!).

We'd actually gone down because Eve was running in the half marathon on Saturday morning. Andy had spent so much time in the Marriot in Washington DC that he managed to get us four Concierge class rooms for the price of two standards. You'll be eager to know what differentiates a Concierge class room from the peasant class - oh the luxury, oh the comfort, oh (in fact) the sideplate bearing an apple and an orange, access to the Concierge lounge (closed for the Thanksgiving weekend) and a printed memo from the under-manager thanking us for being such suckers. Businessmen get charged nearly double the normal price of a room for these heady delights. Next time I'm a CEO remind me to insist that everyone I employ stays in B&Bs. They'll be much more comfortable and I'll save a fortune.

Saturday dawned. But not until we'd all been up for three hours. Eve neglected to mention that she had to be in downtown Seattle for 6.15am, and this necessitated some super-human willpower in the getting-out-of-bed department. On reflection it added to the day. And detracted from the next three.

After dropping Eve off to catch the bus out to the race start Andy, Helen and I turned to the serious mater of breakfast. America is famous for it's breakfasts -

(Interlude) It isn't, however famous for the dire quality of it's roads in Washington state. The road through Stanley Park, in Vancouver, is so antique that the entire road surface has disappeared. This would have been smooth luxury in comparison to almost the entire freeway that joins the Peace Arch on the Canadian border to Seattle.

...but do you think we could find an open breakfast bar? In the course of the search we drove all around the downtown area, and ended up parked right underneath the Space Needle in what turned out to be the oldest grill-cafe in the city. It was opened in 1929 by the father of the current owner, and I reckon that it probably hasn't been decorated since about 1950. The waitress (black nail-polish is so appropriate to the serving of food) afforded us the look one would generally reserve for a small dead rodent, and suggested that we could please ourselves about where we would sit, and that she might, if she felt like it, see her way clear to bringing over some coffee at some point. It was 7am.

We paused at this point to consider the other customers. We were probably the only ones who had got up that morning, since all the others seemed to be enjoying the closing moments of the night before. Most were solitary, some were so solitary they appeared to have left the planet some time previously. The coffee arrived and was excellent, as was the orange juice. Andy decided to endear himself to the waitress by ordering food that wasn't on the menu, and the waitress fixed him with a steely gaze and said "That'll be a number 7 then". Funnily enough, so was mine and I'd ordered a number 5. There was no discernable difference.

At this point we'll move into the first toilet anecdote. Three hours in an air-conditioned car the night before had played havoc with my osmosis (or something) and I spent the entire weekend in a perpetual dash from one public loo to the next. The toilets in the cafe were unique in my experience. Decorated in floor to ceiling dark blue tiles, every one of which was probably an antique, the room measured about 8 by 4 feet. A sink was attached to one corner. A hole in the floor indicated that most of that wall was the urinal. The chap sitting on an un-cubicled toilet in the other corner listening to a walkman loud enough for me to hear, seemed un-perturbed by my appearance. My social education left me unprepared to talk to anyone taking a dump in the same room as me so I decided against engaging him in conversation. While making use of the wall I had reason to look out of what I had previously taken to be a window of sorts, looking down a ten foot tube to daylight. On closer inspection I noticed that, perfectly framed in the window was the top of the Space Needle, which I was pretty sure was a: on the other side of the building and b: 500ft up in the air.

The window turned out to be a bizarre periscope arrangement. I can't help feeling that the Tumbledown Dick should employ one, although the Dick's toilets were far more luxurious than this place. And it would be something of a challenge to see the Space Needle from Hampshire.

The food, I need hardly point out, was superb. You don't get to stay in business for 70 years without having some redeeming features. The waitress, who by this point was rather less morose, brought us an entire coffee machine so that we shouldn't run out and so that she could stay on her chair undisturbed.

OK, back to the marathon. After some searching we caught up with the runners and hung around until Eve sauntered past. After nine miles I wouldn't have looked quite so chirpy. After that there was a dash to the finish line to see her come in around 3000th. Pretty good really - it's one of the big marathons apparently, but I can't help thinking that late November was a poor time to run it, especially at that ungodly time of day.

Eve had entrusted her car to my driving for the day. It's a Mazda MX6, 6 cylinders, alarmingly fast, leather and wood trim all over the place and (this is a laugh) a manual gearbox. The first time I've ever driven a left hand drive manual before, and quite a strange feeling. Completely screwed up driving my own car when I got back into it today though - for the first few miles I had a bad case of floating left foot, searching in vain for an absent clutch pedal.

Loretta and Tamas has recommended that we visit the underground tour of Seattle while we were there. I need to give you some background first though, and it involves toilets again. In the 1850s and 1860s Seattle was one of the first cities in North America to have a good plumbing system, complete with flush toilets and a piped water system. The flush system took all the waste away, dropped it thoughtfully into the ocean, where the tide took it away down the coast. Excellent. Except that six hours later the tide brought it all back again and pushed it up the sewerage system, creating a rather unpleasant geyser effect in toilets all over the city. As the tour guide said, it was the only place where a generation of children grew up with their bowel movements regulated by the moon.

The only solution was to elevate the toilets - the height above ground level was a fairly good indication of the wealth of the household. Then the city burned to the ground.

The local council decided that this was an ideal time to combat the problem of the sewage, the rampant disease and the squalor, and issued legislature which decreed that the ground level of the city should be raised by between eight and forty feet, to take it up to above the geyser level. It would take about ten years to complete the planned work. The locals told them where to stuff it and began to rebuild their houses on their own.

The council, undeterred, decided to implement the plan anyway. They owned the roads, and therefore decided to rebuild them at the level they wanted - that is between eight and forty feet above the old ground level. People walking along the streets could look into second, third and fourth floor windows. Seventeen people fell to their deaths stepping from the roads to the pavements, and pedestrian crossings had to make use of ladders on either side.

Eventually the locals gave in and built new pavements from street level to the upper floors of their houses. This left several floors of many buildings underground, and this was the focus of the tour. Undamaged by weather there are old shop fronts, interiors, pavements that feel new, whole chunks of the town that were just covered up when everything went up a floor or two. You walk through an old Vaudeville theatre, bank vaults, none of which has been tarted up for tourists. The tour has been going for more than thirty years, and the tour guides are local comics and actors; ours was like Jim Carey probably was before he forgot that being an actor involves more than pulling funny faces. Go to Seattle, go underground, its fab.

Also, it really is the city of coffee. Every other shop is a Starbucks Coffee House. By the end of Saturday I was gagging for a fruit juice. That, the constant toilet visits and the air conditioning meant that I was dehydrating fast.

Another word about the hotel - it was set around a big covered quadrangle housing a swimming pool surrounded by palm trees and overlooked by totem poles. Nicely understated. I don’t think. Rather like the Seattle Post Intelligencer (snappy name) the local newspaper, after a fashion. Delivered free and slipped under my door on Saturday morning, so I was quite disappointed that I didn't get one on Sunday - until I stepped out of the room and fell over it. In the corridor people were treating it like a roundabout. It contained 39 separate sections, and measured around three inches thick. After discarding the worthless bits of adverts I was left with eight pieces, rather more manageable but still almost totally devoid of real news.

All in all a great weekend. Back in Vancouver there's been another unexpected four inches of snow, and more showers are forecast... I nipped out to get some snow chains today, and a gadget that helps you uncover your car if you should inadvertently find yourself under an avalanche. With my Starbucks mug, emergency sleeping bag and nuclear war rations the boot of my car is filling up rapidly.

Today I gave my first speech to the Toastmasters club. About me, so not too tricky a subject. Seemed to go OK too, palms not too sweaty before or after. Only another 15 to go before I'm allowed to do it professionally! The club are a really nice bunch too, mostly from Hughes Corp. and all very outgoing Canadians (and an Australian or two). Good fun.

That's just about it for this time. More of an account of the last few days than my usual observations of the locals. Hopefully engaging nonetheless. Today I've got my first snowboard lesson booked, which should be entertaining to say the least. Eve and I went up to watch last weekend and even the bunny slope looked terrifying. I fear that bruising may be the order of the day tomorrow. I'll keep you informed...