Super delayed post about my mini vacation. On May 21 to May 24, I had a short but fun vacation with Mart. My trip to Seattle was full of city exploration! I jumped the gun and while I was cramming for my ocular disease midterm, I decided to purchase plane tickets / Airbnb for Seattle so that we could have something to look forward to during my week off! I was slightly going insane from the constant studying, so I really wanted to have a prize at the end to keep myself motivated. :)

As soon as we were in Seattle, I marveled at all of the greenery that was literally everywhere! So pretty, and so refreshing.

Our Airbnb location was great. A peaceful section of town that was close enough to the tourist attractions nearby. It didn’t actually rain very often while we were there, even though we were prepared for non-stop rain haha. The weather was beautiful most days though.

Here are the places we hit up:

• Ye Olde Curiosity Shop: Lots of weird and wonky stuff, like mummies, shrunken heads, other oddities.
• Gum Wall: Everyone who goes to Seattle always has that famous picture of the gumwall. It’s kind of gross if you think about too hard, but very fun! I completely forgot to bring gum to leave my own addition to the wall, but a photo was enough for me haha.
• Pike Place Market: We ate Piroshky Piroshky (a Russian Bakery) and at Country Dough (a Szechuan sandwich place). Such great food at the market; it’s too bad we don’t have enough room to eat it all. We also grabbed a few things at Pike Place Souvenirs.
• Kerry Park: Instead of spending the money to go up the observatory, we visited Kerry Park, which had a beautiful view that is almost just as good (and free! :P). It was very chilly up there, but nice to take a breather and take in the view.
• Olympic Sculpture Park: We love walking through parks and looking at gardens and sculptures. The weirdest piece of work was the head-turning Echo sculpture. As you walk along, it seems as if she’s turning her head. She also looks very surreal, as if she’s just photoshopped.
• Shiro’s: We had an omakase dinner at Shiro’s, which was very fresh and very divine. It did not, however, rival the best sushi place in our hometown, Orange County
• Washington Park Arboretum, Seattle Japanese Garden: Probably one of the highlights of our trip, since we love gardens, and Japanese gardens in particular. We bought some koi kibble to feed the koi fish. Even the turtles and ducks wanted in on that delicious koi kibble!
• Paseo: Three times! We could not get enough of this Cuban sandwich place. It was arguably the best sandwich I’ve ever had in my life, lol. We ate there twice, and then got some to-go for our wait at the airport.
• Theo Chocolate Factory: The chocolate tour was very interesting, and the best part was the unlimited sampling! We were able to try dark chocolate that was some ridiculous amount of pure cacao, like 90-something percent. It was extremely tangy and sour even.
• Fremont Troll: I’m glad we were able to snap some pics with the famous troll under the Fremont bridge, because I saw a friend take a picture with him on Facebook recently, and he was sadly graffitied on :(
• Fremont Brewing: We didn’t really have set plans, so we kind of wandered around and found this brewery. Excellent beer with free apples and pretzels. It was a great place to chat and feel a light buzz :)
• The Barrel Thief: We continued with some wine tastings here. I loved how upscale and fancy it looked inside.
• Starbucks Reserve Roastery: It was fun seeing the huge Starbucks roastery! There were people sitting at the Starbucks bar, trying coffee and macaron flights. Fancy. I went for a unique drink, which I loved and hated at the same time. It was a smoked butterscotch latte with black pepper. Yeah.
• Seattle University: Our Airbnb was next door of SeattleU, so we decided to pop on by and visit the campus. Beautiful campus with a lot of greenery and gardens. We even walked around the student center and blended right in :P
• Skillet: The food was amazing! Even the cobb salad was amazing.
• Uncle Ike’s Pot Shop: I will preface this by saying MJ is legal in Seattle, WA. It was really interesting seeing what a legit store looks like. They had any form of MJ imaginable!
• Elliot Book Bay Company: A giant bookstore for all your bookworm needs. We had a lot of fun relaxing at a table, perusing through books together. It felt like we were Seattle natives on a bookstore date :P
• Unicorn: A bar that was seriously rainbowy with strange decor all over the place. It was karaoke night and listening to the drunken singers was a lot of fun.
• Tavern Law: We had some fancy cocktails here, which were really refreshing.
• Nue: Unique fusion items for dinner. My favorite was the pineapple cornbread – I could have eaten a loaf of that, lol. The cornbread accompanied some pretty bomb goat curry. We also got some Jamaican jerk chicken, and crispy fries with a Japanese spin on it.
• Espresso Vivace: Had our first “white flats” here and it was extremely creamy & smooth.
• Twice Sold Tales: Specifically went here only because I knew it was a used bookstore with cats freely roaming the bookshelves. The woman who owned the shop was extremely unfriendly so that was a damper on our experience, but that’s okay.

We’d love to go back someday, with the emphasis being on the nature spots and hiking next time!