UMTravels

It started out to be such a quite day of working a handful of hours, and then the plan was to meet up with Tokyo Dave, his wife and kids around 7 for dinner.

Who could have foreseen the tornado of Wonderful, Atrosius and Gnarlene whirling through around 5:30. So much for watching the news!

Dave and family are staying at the Panama Hotel down in the International District, which is a little down scale from what I would expect, but an interesting place none the less. Downstairs is the cafe where my buddy Glo loves to have tea. That would be the Panama Tea and Coffee House.

I actually beat then to the hotel — parked at my old apartment since it was three blocks away — and hung out front chatting with a couple of Dutch tourist boys. The hotel itself is your old (1910) hotel where the desk is on the 3rd floor, with their room on the second…. and no elevator, and shared bathrooms. Upside is that it’s under $100 a night whcih is cheap in Seattle.

Dinner was at the Shanghai Restaurant made famous by Swanda (and their hand shaven buckwheat noodles) where in true Swanda fashion, we ordered too many dishes. We even ordered a bottle of wine with dinner — which turned out to be a quite passable Jekel Merlot.

After dinner was a walking tour of Uwyjamaya to ogle groceries, and then a tour of the upstairs garden. I would have shown them the apartment, but it was “occupied”.

I was going to let them walk back, but after being panhandled once, and oddly approached by someone else, we all went back together. Don’t know if the neighborhood has changed, or whether I was just never out at 9:30 at night.

Home I headed stuffed. When Wonderful called at ten, I was already in repose, exhausted.

[220.0]