The Last Post being in Seattle

Hi Everybody!

This is my last post in this blog being in Seattle, I’m leaving on Thursday morning but I got to say that I have really enjoyed studying at the University of Washington and living in Seattle for the last 3 weeks.

It has been an amazing experience to study in a University as the UW; first the campus is beautiful, it really motives me to learn. Also, at the UW I met wonderful persons as my teacher Freida, she’s a professional, an incredible person and I really loved to go to her classes because they were really fun and interesting, I definitely will miss her, also my teacher Elinor is a really cool person, I mean I just had classes with her on Wednesdays but she was really helpfully.

And well, living in Seattle was so incredible, it’s a beautiful city, I get used to live in here, in the U-District, at the ave, with its cold weather and the rain and the coffee everywhere.  In a future I would like to Study my master here at the UW and live in Seattle, because I guess there are too many things left to know, to learn of this city, of this culture.

Seattle, University of Washington… it has been a pleasure.

Antonio

Ballard Locks and Fremont

This time I’m going to talk about the Ballard Locks that my classmates and I visited last Wednesday.

First, a lock is a device for raising and lowering boats between stretches of water of different levels on river and canal waterways. So in Ballard there are two locks located at the west end of Salmon Bay and Lake Washington.

 These lock were built for three reasons:

1.  To prevent the mixing of seawater from Puget Sound with the fresh water of the lakes.
2. To maintain the water level of the fresh water of the Lake Union at 20-22 feet.
3. In order to short distances.

The Locks can elevate a large boat from 10 to 15 minutes and the boats that go trough them can pass over 1 millions of cargo, fuel, building material and seafood.

Was a cool experience to visit the Locks.

Tuesday, my classmates went to Ballard, a neighborhood that is located in the northwestern part of Seattle, I couldn’t go because I bought the City Pass and it expires 11/20 and there’s two museums left to see so I went to them: the EMP Museum and the Pacific Science Center.

I heard that Ballard is the traditional center of Seattle's ethnically Scandinavian seafaring community, who were drawn to the area because of the salmon fishing opportunities, so this weekend i would try to go and i will shared my experience with you all.

Thanks for reading my blog.

Antonio.

Burke Museum and Bainbridge Island

Hi Everybody!

This time I’m going to talk about one of my best experiences here in Seattle:

Well, last Tuesday my classmates and I went to the Burke Museum that is located in the Main Campus of the University of Washington.

The Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture was founded in 1885 and it’s the oldest public museum in Washington. There you can fin a lot of galleries like “Life and Times of Washington State” or my favorite one: “The Pacific Voices” that talks about the native peoples in the Pacific, how they adapt and how they preserve their culture, also there is a lot of Asian art and some ceremonies that are really interesting.

Definitely I really like the museum. Then, after the museum we met with the other group at the Washington Statue to go to the Bainbridge Island. To get there, we had to arrive to the Seattle Ferry Terminal that is located in downtown near to the Pike Place Market.

So, once we got there, we arrived in the Ferry to the Bainbridge Island, that is located at the west of Seattle also is considered as the second largest city in Kitsap County.

Well, the trip was really nice, the view of Seattle is incredible and although it was really cold, I traveled the whole trip outside the trip. Once we got into the Island you can notice that is a beautiful and quite city.

But the best part of the trip was the come back to Seattle, I arrived in the 4:30 Ferry so I had the chance to see the sunset and the night view of Seattle that is so amazing,  that is one of the things you should do before you kick the bucket.

The Harbor tour and the Seattle Aquarium

Last week my friend Alberto and I bought the City Pass, and on Tuesday we went to the Space Needle and made two trips to the Top one in the day and another one at night, it was really nice, the view of the City was amazing, it was really cold up there but the view definitely worth it.

On Saturday my friends and I decided to make the Harbor tour, on a kind of Ferry. We set off at 3 PM in the Pier where’s the Seattle Great Wheel and the Aquarium. First, it was a sunny warm day but once we were on the Ferry it was so cold, anyway we were really excited to travel by the Elliot Bay and the Seattle Harbor.

Once we were on the sea, the view of the city was really amazing! I really enjoyed the trip, seeing the sea, the mountain ranges at the back and the spectacular panoramic of Seattle.

And yesterday (Sunday) I went to the Seattle Aquarium, it was such a great experience because there are different kind of fish and you can learn a lot about them. I was really surprised because I saw an octopus, I had never seen one, so I was really surprised the octopus was kind of weird.

But definitely the best part of the Aquarium is the Gallery where you can touch the plants and the sea stars.  It was really cool to feel the texture of them and the staff talk about one animal (that doesn’t look like an animal) but he said it as a kind of “Sea Cleaner” so if you pressed too much it stars to move, was really funny and scare at the same time. After that, we went out to the Pier and looked at the sunset it was really beautiful.

Class Interviews with native speakers

Hello there!

At the end of the English Course I have to present a Final Project and I decided to talk about “Seattle as a Green City”, so a part of the project is make some interviews to native speakers about the topic and last Friday some native speakers came to the Classroom and we had the chance to talk with them.

It was a really cool experience because we could ask them some questions about the topic and we had the chance to hear their opinions about it. The first question I asked to them was: How can you define a Green City? And all the answers were almost the same: A City that is engage with environment, which is worry about sustainability, about green spaces and the most important life quality.

Almost all of them think Seattle is a green city, in fact, one of the greenest cities in the United States. Expect a guy thinks that Seattle is not green as other cities like San Francisco because there’s not enough public transportation for the people.

I found really interesting how people who live here in Seattle had a Recycling Culture, I mean they recycle because they are used to do it, they like to, they enjoy it, and they don’t imagine themselves not doing it, and that’s why I chose this topic because I want to share this Recycling Culture with my classmates in México maybe, we could become Mexico City in a real Green City.