Duck tour

On Saturday we went on what was voted "seattle's Best Tour of 2007." We rode the "ducks." It is a vehicle that goes on land and in the water. They were built in WW2 by the women.. and are still running! We rode around Seattle and saw some parts of the city which we want to go back and see again. We also plunged into Lake Union and saw lots of houseboats and "floating homes-" including the Sleepless in seattle house. We even saw one of the ships feature on "deadliest Catch." Also... the gift shop sold tons of fun duck stuff.. You may not know this, but ducks are like my second favorite animal. I do not know why- I just like it when they sit upside down in the water! Anyways, our tour guide was hilarious and told us some great stories about Seattle. Let me tell you a few...

There is a statue of "The Hammering Man" outside of the Seattle Art Museum. It hammers 4times a minute every day of the year except for Labor Day... she said that this proves the city is full of hippies.

Back in the day, San Fransisco used to burn down a lot- and Seattle used to bail them out and sell them lumber every time that it happened.. and they laughed all the way to the bank.. until Seattle itself burned down! That's when they decided to build the city up higher. our apartment building is on First Avenue.. and the waterfront used to actually be up to First Avenue. Anyways, they raised the level of the city because the tides used to come in and put pressure on the pipes and make the toilets explode!

Oh.. the reason that there is so much art in the city is that each building has to donate 1% of its profits to the upkeep of the art surrounding the building. On that note, there are these really fancy brick staircases on each side of one building downtown. the stairs do not actually go anywhere. you just walk up them, admire the stairs and walk back down. guess what building the surround? The federal building... at least we know that the government wastes money everywhere!

Finally, once we were in the water- we saw a place called Gasworks Park. They used to turn crude oil into gasoline there, but after it burned down- they closed it. So the city wanted to build housing on it, but they were told that the environment was too polluted.... so the city decided to build a park there. It gets better... well since the area was so polluted- no grass would grow, so they dug up the topsoil and put down a layer of sludge. Well grass grew.. but so did something else. You see, tomato seeds are not digested... and so tons of tomato plants started growing. The city told the residents that they could go pick the tomatoes for free.. AND people actually did! ha! Isn't that gross?!?