Seattle - The home of Starbucks, Microsoft, Amazon...and Boeing!

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October 4th 2006

Published: October 4th 2006

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JacobRTW

Seattle

The market and the harbour in the background.

Greetings from Seattle, WA!!

I hope everybody is doing fine back home in Europe.
Due to a 9 hours time difference between the American west coast (where I am now) and continental Europe I am only online when most of you aren't.
I hope you're enjoying the blog though and feel free to leave a comment.

I have now moved again (yeah I know, I'm really flying all over this country) and I have made it to the northwest of the US to the city of Seattle. The city is just three hours drive from the Canadian border and the city of Vancouver.

Today I made a visit to the Boeing factory in Everett about one hour north of Seattle, that was one of the main reasons for going there.
The place was just so cool, the factory is actually the world's largest building in terms of volume and is included in the Guiness book of world records.
It took a little while to get there, actually more than three hours back and forth by public transportation, but on the other hand the buses are so cheap here, I paid less than five dollars return.

At the

Seattle

Downtown Seattle seen from the harbour.

Boeing site they had a visitor's centre with some nice exhibitions, for example lots of information about the new Boeing 787 Dreamliner and the history of Boeing.
You could for example go into the fuselage of a B787 and see a mock-up cabin, pretty cool!
They also had a gift shop with lots of nice things to buy.
The actual tour was of course the highlight though and I got to enter the building where they produce the Boeing 777 and the guide took us to a balcony where we got an excellent view of the production site.
Security was a bit tight though and we were not allowed to bring cameras on the tour (or basically any personal belongings), one reason was that they were afraid we would drop something from the balcony that could hit some expensive machines or aircraft components.
Apparently this happened a few years ago when a camera damaged a component worth 250,000 US dollars and the owner of the camera was liable to pay most of that (if not all).
We were told they need 3 million components to build a Boeing 777 and 6 million for a Boeing 747. I can't understand how

Seattle

Lots of coffee houses in Seattle, like this one "Seattle's best coffee". There are tons of Starbucks here as well, more than in any other city I have visited.

they manage to get it right! Impressive!

Haven't seen much of Seattle yet, that's for tomorrow, but the city seems nice, if yet a bit rainy (it rains 200 days per year I was told).
This is the coffee mecca of the US, and the city where Starbucks was founded, so there are lots of coffee houses I'm looking forward to try. In that sense this is definitely the city for me 😉
There are lots of book shops as well (Amazon.com was founded here), but unfortunately anything I buy I have to carry around for another six weeks.

The hostel is pretty cool though, right in the middle of the city centre.
I am paying for a premium dorm while is slightly larger than the other dorms and with only four beds, and we have seaview!! Didn't know there were hostels with seaview, but the room actually overlooks the harbour of Seattle, really nice in the evening!
I have two really nice roommates, Daniel, an Australian guy from Sydney and Martin from Germany (Magdeburg I think). We had a pretty fun evening out yeasterday drinking lots of beer and whiskey.

Next stop: Dallas! I'm really covering