Do It Go

Mom was joking on my phone the day of my arrival to Seattle, she said it rains a lot in Seattle. Coming from the UK, that’s not surprising and it didn’t surprise me that upon my arrival, it was raining, actually pouring, not that light mist I read about in the travel guides.

After finding one of the Seattle luxury hotels where I have reservations, and checking in, I headed to the library. I took a quick look in the Lonely Planet guidebook for Seattle. They say Seattle has only about 55 days without rain and the other 310 days have some fog or MIST or a presents of clouds. Again, another guide book not mentioning a down pour. Luckily, it only lasted a few hours and then it changed to the well known cloudy mist. I couldn’t see any of the top of the skyscrapers.

I went to the Experience Music Project after the library, and found out the Seattle was the home town of Jimi Hendrix, but it was in New York where he was spotted and in London where he made it big. The EMP complex cost $450 million to create by one of the Microsoft co-founders. The building is the weirdest thing I’ve seen to date. Apparently, it is controversial among the Seattlites because it was inspired when the architect bought many guitars and smashed them all up and used this pile of broken guitars as the inspiration for this building.

Needless to say, I thoroughly enjoyed the EMP complex. I learned a lot about the history of music, about the guitar, the West coast music scene, and tons about Jimi Hendrix. The founder is a huge fan of Jimi Hendrix, and actually, this building was to be all about Jimi, but thankfully, he expanded upon the idea. There was a section where I could mess around on a few instruments. The EMP provides a MEG (an electronic guide) that I could point at an exhibit, or key in a number, and the MEG informed me, via headphones, about the exhibit I’m looking at. Got to give kudos to the Microsoft co-founder to have up-to-date electronics in his building.

Tomorrow, I’m off to Portland, but first I’ll check out the Seattle music scene tonight.

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Tags: Experience Music Project, Jimi Hendrix, Seattle luxury hotels

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 6th, 2010 at 1:40 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.