Happy Saturday!
I’m actually writing this on Friday, about 12 hours before I will arrive home. I am alone in the hotel room while my mom and her friend sped off to finish the business we came to LA to do.
This is the longest she’s left me alone this entire week. The second longest was when we split up in Seattle – she went to get dinner while I returned to the hotel. I actually feel more at peace right now than I’ve been this whole week. When my mom is here, she likes to pace about the room with YouTube turned up. I can’t hear my thoughts nor anything else. It’s very annoying.
Her friend took us to the beach yesterday. I personally don’t care about spending time at the beach. I don’t see the reason to lie there on the sand and do nothing when there could a million things to do nor do I care to walk on the beach and get sand in my shoes, although I would never say no to staring and photographing the water. There’s something about the movements of the water that’s mesmerizing, don’t you think?
Perhaps, that’s a part of being in love with nature.
Overall, this has been a very interesting and eye-opening trip.
Before I left on the trip, I asked my coworker about Seattle, like where to avoid, and he specifically said to avoid downtown but it turned out downtown is unavoidable because to get to the water front, we just walk from downtown. Every interesting landmark in Seattle is near downtown. I kept trying to find alternate routes to take but that’s just a waste of valuable time.
I ended up braving it and it was eye-opening because I have always felt relatively safe walking in downtown Salt Lake City but in Seattle, I did not. I felt exposed and vulnerable. There was a constant stench of cannabis in the air, which I tried not to breathe and once in a while, we would see someone dragging their feet, their clothes half-hanging, as they walked toward us. It’s a sad and scary scene.
I’m looking forward to going home. Even though I once lived in LA, I no longer belong here no matter how familiar the roads still are to me. The chaos, the traffic, the noise are not for me. I may visit the state of Washington again but probably not to Seattle. That city isn’t for me either.
I appreciate you stopping by and thank you to Natalie for hosting Weekend Coffee Share. I hope you have a wonderful week ahead.
This is Another Story 
Hi Yinglan, It’s not surprising the Seattle smells like cannabis. It has a long history with the weed, popular way before it was legal to be popular. Portland, where I lived, was the same way. My first husband grew up in Seattle, so we spent every third weekend there visiting his mother. I actually loved it, but wouldn’t want to live there, for a couple of the reasons you mentioned. I can’t imagine you in LA, but your beach picture is inviting. I’d love to be walking on the beach right now. 🙂 Have a great week.
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L.A., San Francisco, Seattle… even Vancouver in Canada. I grew up near SF, went to college near LA, and lived in Seattle and Vancouver. Something started around 2008, at the end of the “Great Recession”. There have always been rough areas (I could have warned you about the Union Station area in LA). But 2008 was the first time I’d ever seen someone shoot up in public in San Francisco. A couple of years later, I watched the coroner remove three overnight ODs from Pioneer Park in Seattle. And proximity to a supervised drug-injection facility trashed Vancouver’s Chinese historical district. Almost two decades later, it’s either the the status quo or an excuse for costly programs.
2015 we stayed in Salt Lake City over Christmas, and then went to San Francisco for the New Year. Night and day. I recall a few paraprofessional panhandlers in SLC. But SF was just ridiculous, with two shootings along Jefferson and the Embarcadero (touristy areas) before the night was over. After touring SF with visitors from Japan in 2016, I haven’t been back for anything other than business.
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Photographing water is very calming. It have happened on a couple occasions during my travels that I’ve felt unsafe (Honolulu, Santa Fe, and LA,) but nothing every happened during any of these times. I have however been assaulted twice in Gothenburg, but that was a long time ago and I was at the wrong place (without knowing that I was at the wrong place).
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