Monday

OK, I've caught up with myself now and can be a little more verbose. Still in Seattle, was going to go to San Francisco today but I left booking my accommodation till too late, so I'll book it for later and go to LA first. I'm trying to decide if I have any predictions about Melbourne based on Seattle, but I think they are actually so similar that they need to retain their differences as much as possible. Small differences are everywhere: you need a key to access the "restroom" in almost every cafe; coffee by default is served as a double-shot ristretto; tattoos are quite common, including on neck, fingers, etc; in most cafés there is no table service, you collect your coffee and take your dirty dishes back to the bar. There is a guy making a host of vulgar snorting noises right next to me, so.... [hours go by] ... and, we're back! I couldn't help buying some books in this bohemian little store called Spine and Crown; there's quite a few second-hand bookstores of that flavour in Seattle, but this one is smaller and seemed to have more carefully selected stock. I was drawn in by Sartre's Introduction to Existentialism but ended up settling for nerd value and picked up The Emperor's New Mind by Roger Penrose, Oxford Guide to the Mind and a cute little book from the seventies, Taxicab Geometry: An Adventure in Non-Euclidean Geometry by Eugene F. Krause, which turns out to be a serious learning tool disguised behind seventies fonts and page-long chapters. I told myself not to buy books until the end of my trip due to the weight, but I couldn't help myself. I also bougt a very handsome modern shirt, white with a decorative black stripe, that will look great with my forties trousers, I reckon. Also picked up a grey bow-tie with it, because... why not? :)