one last thing before I quit

Day Seven seems to have stopped by very quickly. We happily decided to go out for a late breakfast / early lunch. Figuring that we'd spend a good chunk of our day at Pike Place Market, we made our way to our new favorite place, Lowell's, for the third time on the trip. Even though we've gone there a few times, we always got something different. It was a nice, reliably delicious place to go, that was reasonably priced and somewhat close to the hotel.

We had been in and out, and spent no more then about 20 minutes at a time in the market, so we after grabbing some grub, we made our way to one end of the market and proceeded to check things out. There was tons to see with a bunch of people everywhere. After looking at a couple smaller nick-nack shops, we found ourselves by one of the big fish stations. The workers had little jingle-ish things that they yelled when they made a sale, got a tip, pretty much when anything happened. They even tossed fish from the front display to the workers behind the counter. It was somewhat exciting. We continued to walk around the market, looking at things ranging from fresh flowers and produce, to wooden puzzles and hand-blown bowls (which Jess bought one of).

But it wasn't until we left the indoors part of the market, and ventured to the little kiosks outside, that I found what I had been looking for. I'll post a longer post in a few days, but here's the gist for now. A local artist did his own drawings and caricatures on hats, shoes, bags, etc. He had things ranging from pop culture characters, to just names and locations. It was beautiful. After all was said and done, I picked up 3 hats, a Michelangelo, a Sloth and a Stay Puft Marshmallow Man one. I'll post pictures of these later as well. The guy was super nice too. That put me in a good mood.

The rest of the market adventure was short. We saw and listened to a couple buskers, admired some of the food on display, watched cheese be made, and then struggled our way back up the hilly street.

We jetted back to the hotel to drop of our purchases, and figured that we should get one last big splurge of shopping done. So we headed back to the business district downtown. This is where more of the box-stores can be found, like Urban Outfitters, Banana Republic and H&M. There were tons of stores, and they all covered at least 2 floors. We proceeded to dispose of plenty of our remaining money, because we like to help out the economy of course.

With the night rolling in, we stopped by the Fox Sports Grill of a quick bite. We each got a burger, easily a good 8 inches tall. It was super good though, and helped fulfill my BBQ craving that i had most of the trip. The night ended shortly after that as we just watched the Mariner's game from the hotel on the team's own TV channel. My only concern was about clearing customs in a couple days.