Agreed. I moved here 50 years ago, at age 5, and I love to travel, but there's no place like home.

I don't think I've ever heard Pike Place Market called "overrated." It's pretty awesome except for the FUCKING CARS THAT ARE ALLOWED TO DRIVE THROUGH IT!

Seattle would suck 20% less if just that one thing changed.

A feeble yet strangely welcome I,A.

No letter grade - it gets a "pass" on the pass/fail binary.

@2: sometimes in the morning i drive down stewart and north on pike place to get to western. it works fine; there's barely anyone around. the only time it really doesn't work is on summer weekends.

PPM will always have delivery and emergency vehicle access. private vehicle access is already limited at those times.

"The company I worked for was accepting, had gender awareness training when they found out I was transitioning. They even paid for it."

now
That's
the kinda
Capitalism
that'll likely
Save the Planet

if not the Universe.

how on Earth
do we Make
It Happen
Everyw-
here?

I've lived in a lot of places, but Seattle will always be home...by choice.

When I moved to Seattle in early 1987 after two very long, but necessary years in Houston and Galveston, I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. It's like no other place in America, and I'm overly protective of it. I wanted to make sure that I wouldn't be an ugly outsider, so I didn't have a car there, and I recycled EVERYTHING. Of course, my friends who were natives just rolled their eyes.

The winters are grey and gorgeous. The summers are emerald and technicolor. And both smell faintly of the sea. Hard to make friends there, though. Everybody thinks so. Vancouver, too. I think it's because people are busy working and working on themselves. But really, I've heard stories of two people seeing each other at a bus stop every morning for ten years and never getting beyond the "good morning" stage. Remember how popular the "I Saw U" feature was? Anonymous attraction works better than asking someone out in person.

The city council pretty much always made me want to pull my hair out by the roots and dunk my bloody scalp into a bucket of iodine, but I will always love Seattle.

Please continue to tell people who don't live there, "It rains all the bloody time!"

@9 I miss "I Saw U" badly. And "No, You Shut Up." Those were good days of The Stranger. It's pretty bleak these days.

My father came to America in 1953, speaking no English. After a few years in eastern Washington he defected (from our large extended farming family) to Seattle. He proclaimed it "God's Country" every time we returned across Snoqualmie Pass. His first apartment was in the basement of a Chinese restaurant on Capitol Hill where broken English was the norm. Times have changed, but it's still the Emerald City.