Wanna know the best snack ever??

Ritz crackers and peanut butter!! MMMMmmmmmm... that is what I am eating right now.

In other news, on Monday, my family minus Alex and plus Erik and Jamie (My family - Alex + Erik + Jamie, for you math types) went on the Underground Tour of Seattle. It was pretty awesome. I have wanted to do this since I moved here, and seeing as how I am now going on my 5th year here, I think that it was way past time to do this. The tour started out in Pioneer Square in an old tavern (which was way cool cause of the decorations) where they told us some Seattle history about the pioneers and what they did... blah blah blah. Then we went down and looked at the underground part. It wasn't really what I was expecting, it just sort of looked like someone's very, very dirty basement (and in fact, you get into it from the basements of the buildings in the area), but it was cool nonetheless.


Why do we have an underground, might you ask? Well, they had these things called toilets (crappers, they called them, because the guy who invented them... his last name was Crapper). Anyhow, when Seattle was a young pup, the city area as a whole was a lot lower (about 10 feet), which meant that basically it was built on the tidal flats. This was okay, but the plumbing for all of these new fangled crappers was hooked up so that the force of gravity pushed the expelled contents out of the toilet and out into Elliot Bay. This was all well and good (other than the polluting the bay with human waste part) until the tide came in, when the in-rushing of water would fill the pipes up BACKWARDS so that you had, what the tour fondly referred to as "Exploding Crappers". I am serious... they would explode sea water and raw sewage and other delightful things. So this was a big problem, and as I see it, the main reason that they decided to basically raise the city another level.


And then they got lucky...there was a fire that burned down a lot of Seattle in 1907 (?) and the city officials decided that when they rebuilt, they should bring in soil and rock to raise the streets about 10 feet or so. But the merchants wanted to get back to business, so they began building right away on the old level. This meant that there were shops and sidewalks that were 10 feet below the raised street and they had to put ladders on the corners so that people could get down! (There was also a frightening statistic that they quoted us about people being smashed and killed by things falling off of passing trucks up above on the streets.) Eventually, the merchants let the city raise the sidewalks too. They did this by putting a beam from the street to the building, and covering it with brick and cement to make the new sidewalk. So a lot of what the underground is are these covered sidewalks flanked on one side by the mooring for the street and the other side by what used to be the front of an old building and is now the basement. They put skylights in some of these sidewalks and actually used the underground as a kind of shopping district until they suspected bubonic plague down there. Why it is okay for us to go down there now, I'm not sure, but apparently it's okay! One building they showed us was built with two main entrances, one on the lower level and one on the upper level for when they knew the street would be raised. I wish I could find a picture of a door floating in midair on the second story before the street was raised.



Anyhow, I really, really enjoyed it... lots of history! Although it is kind of confusing to think about, it's cool to see how they effectively raised the entire city by an entire story! If you come to Seattle anytime soon, you should really consider going on this... (and visiting me while you are at it)!!