Got Milt?

Arrived Friday night - Kim and Brian picked us up and took us back to their house. Kim's renting a room in this lady's house and there's a whole lot of pets around. The owner, Vera, has a little dog called Wasabi and a cat, and Kim owns a huge poodle called Rufus and a cat called Daphne. Here's a pic:

Rufus is really cute - Wai you'd absolutely love him. So mild-mannered and well behaved, and he's still just a puppy really at about 1.5yrs old. Anyway, all of us were totally tired, so we just basically crashed and that's that for Friday.

Saturday was pretty casual. We all had a sleep-in, got ourselves slowly together and then headed out to go watch the Summer Solstice parade in Fremont, which is this annual event where anyone can basically participate and it's just a fun, free-spirited parade. Here's a few pics:

These are the naked bicyclists. You totally forget that they're nude because their body paint is so cool - there were some really creative "costumes". There was this huge bunch of Where's Wally/Waldo characters, there was a Fidel Castro, and just heaps of really cool colour designs.

A few more pics:

That one on the right, it's hard to see, but there was a line of four figures all chained together - Condi Rice, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush and there was this lady walking around the crowd chanting "What do we want?" "Impeach!", "When do we want it?" "Now!".

Fish are everywhere in Seattle.

The parade went for a while, and it was really cool and fun to watch. Anyway we were starving after that and so headed out with Kim's friends, who were also there with us watching, to this brewery & pub for lunch. By the time we got back home after that, we were all very deep in our food comas, so we had a nap and got ready to go out again.

One of Kim's friends was having a Redneck themed birthday party, so to get into the spirit of things, we all put on some patriotic USA/redneck tatts. I went with the "Mom":

And here's Emily's:
The party was pretty cool. At some point skipping ropes appeared and everybody started playing Double Dutch. It was totally hard - here's Emily's turn:

The birthday boy: (Jack) in his mu-mu - he was just playing around.

So that was that for Saturday.



Today, we again took it pretty easy in the morning and then headed off to do this Underground tour. Seattle's original town had to be fully raised and built upon because of flooding from the bay, so there is this underground area where the town used to be, so we had a guide take us around and tell us all about it. Here's Kim and I in front of a "crapper" (they were all still called that since it was invented by Thomas Crapper around that time).
After the tour, Emily and I stumbled upon one of the greatest food experiences ever :-). Are you ready for this? OK - it was cheesecake.....on a stick.....dipped in chocolate....and covered in nuts!!! How crazy is that?! We were both in this state of shocked wonderment and amazement at this ingenius creation. Emily's expression says it all:

We tried to rack our brains to think of something that could be better, and we drew a blank. That definitely was really high up on the list of ultimate desserts. Oh man....soooo good.

I love America!

We're all just at home now - Kim, Emily and Brian are making pizzas and we're going to watch Indiana Jones (since I've never seen any of them) and then a Kurosowa film. Should be good.