My walk down downtown Seattle

I am watching "So you think you can dance" . Its similiar to the American Idol except every contestant has to dance. And then you have a similiar voting system. But so far they have danced salsa, hip-hop and next is contemporary something. So it might be that my concentration gets diverted while writing :) ............., but today has been a good day. I am thankful and I have been writing in my mind ever since I was walking back home. So its only fair I write it down.

So my office is about a mile away. And I walk the stretch everyday ...there and back. It is probably the only form of exercise that I get ...(but with the amount of eating out I have been doing it isn't really a lot of good :) ) But my eating habits is not something I want to dwell on here.

Downtown seattle is lined with an amazing variety of stores. I cross streets named Spring, Madison, Washington, Columbia, Main, Jackson, Occidental...and a host of others which I have forgotten. By the end of it I inevitably have unbelievably aching feet, trembling knees, and a distraught "if i had a chair i would sit down here" kind of look on my face.

So you have about three magic carpet stores, yes the same Kashmiri carpets exquisitely woven. Don't ask me the price, I have never dared to ask. But each one on display is so captivating that I continuously stare unabashedly(right word remembered at the right moment :) !!) at each window that I pass. There is a toy store called Magic Mouse and Toys, which is the only store I have visited in downtown and that to thrice, once to ask the price, twice to buy a birthday gift for two different birthday friends. The other neighbors are the book-stores.

Have you seen Notting Hill ? Then have you seen the bookstore Hugh Grant runs ? Well , then you won't have trouble imagining the wooden shelves, lined with books till the roof. There is something amazingly romantic about the brown shelves and the books from all categories nestling in them. Somehow , I have only window shopped ....browsed from outside the glasses , never ventured in. I have to spend some time in each soon. Considering they even inspired me to daydream about how great it would be to be able to spend your entire day surrounded by books.

The other store is Starbucks, :) (You've got mail ..yeh yeh !!) Well just for a bit of trivia, Seattle is where Starbucks started its first store. I have seen it too, it has 1912 written on it.

And finally I couldn't end without saying being "Sleepless in Seattle" is not difficult at all. Shobana and Vishnu messaged me after they saw the movie and in between my hike in Snoqualmie. I started reading the message from the end and it read "missing you and love you a lot." :) (I'll leave it at that !!) (I agree my mood is great bcoz the day went well! )

Hey there

Have been rocking in Seattle so far ..... I went hiking to Snoqualmie falls. Why it was hard is bcoz of this ..I am not a hiker, I am not a regular gym goer, I am not even one for routine work-outs ...... but if you had been to the falls , you would have wished you were into all this. Just to escape the immense tiredness and body-aches in more than a zillion places the next day. It was not a tough hike... slippery rocks were the only danger, and you did make a few trips and falls before you could actually reach the caves near the falls....... But once you reached there you could take enough snaps, from all angles of the falls to show where you had been. :)

Later in the day, the Amazonian interns group - Shweta, Sandhya, (Namita- did not join us in the evening), Natalie, Shashank, Jack, Jason, Brendan, Neil,Jake and me .... a group of eleven hogged on Mexican food at Mama's Kitchen, and then spilled into the movie theatre for Cars. It was not in the same humour league as Shrek 2, but you should see it to see how they have put characters into cars. And the amazing job they have done of it.

Then I ended up watching Ankhen, the one with aftab, amisha and esha deol and is basically about esha being a manic depressive. There is this book , Three men in a boat and this is not my first allusion to it, where the main character ends up reading a book on self-remedies and feels that he has every disease in the book . (Try it sometime - I am sure you will too :)) Well that was quite my case with the movie.... I do not want to end up being manic depressive ....... so I think the best option will be to stay happy. :) So for all the people I have been complaining cribbing to....I hope you have seen the last of that.

So how is Seattle! well with water everywhere, its quite a difference from Tucson. Sunlight shimmering on the bay.... ships and ferries leaving every hour, Oh did I forget to mention, I did not have to move out of the apartment after all so I get to enjoy the view everyday while I am in Seattle. But somehow mountains will always be where my heart is. When you see the overhanging branches on the mud trails, green ferns all around ....such a shade of green which the freshest showers of rain could only have painted in, the crunch of sneakers on the moist mud and twigs strewn about ....... the crooked, curving roads........ wow...could anything be more inviting. That was what is Snoqualmie, Ooty, Kodai ...Darjeeling and any hillstation you can remember.