Things I’ve noticed in a month living in Seattle after having moved here from Vermont for a new job:
- There are way, way more people who smoke here. In any given day in Seattle I’ll see more smokers than I did in a year in Burlington.
- The temperature peaks noticeably later in the day. I’m used to the hottest time of the day being noon to one, but here it seems to be somewhere around three or four PM.
- I’m told that, despite the evidence of the past month, raining ash is actually unusual here.
- Everyone at my new job seems to be really into tons of awesome geeky stuff, which is great fun.
- Food is amazing–on par with Burlington, but there are more options for each kind of food.
- The whole city feels a bit like a scaled-up version of Burlington, actually.
- Caveat to the food thing: I have yet to find a Chinese place that sells the chicken/fried rice/egg roll combo meal that I had until now assumed was universal at Chinese takeout restaurants. You can buy all of those things individually, but they don’t come in the combo, which is cheaper and conveniently sized for one meal of leftovers. This is annoying me far more than it probably should.
- There are so many pho shops.
- There are so many Starbucks.
- Pike Place Market is a lot different when I’m going there on my lunch hour than when I was visiting the city. I really notice the tourists more.
- The couple of friends I had still living in Vermont met up maybe once every other or every third month. Meanwhile, after just a week in Seattle I already had two weekly meetups, for pub trivia and board games. I’d heard a lot about the “Seattle Freeze” making it harder to meet people, but I seem to have skipped that by virtue of already knowing so many people in the city.
- Living by myself means I follow kind of a weird schedule day-to-day. Also, it means I cook more, which I’ve found I actually like.
- Moving was way more expensive than I thought it would be.
- So many of my electronics broke during the move, or immediately after the move. I don’t know what happened. I had all of these things that were steadfastly reliable for years and years, but in the past month I’ve had to replace my gaming PC’s CPU and motherboard, my computer mouse, and my phone. The latest victim was my tablet, which had its screen cracked while passing through a TSA checkpoint before a flight back from Boston this weekend, which is something I honestly can’t afford to repair at the moment.
- I wasn’t sure if I would need a car after moving to Seattle, so I left mine in Vermont for the time being. The answer turned out to be a resounding no. The bus system is great here.
- There seems to be something cool going on every single day here, somewhere in the city.
All these bullet points about food are reminding me that I haven’t eaten yet. Time to reheat some of last night’s pasta, I think.
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