Water here in Seattle is still perceived as a limitless quantity rather than as a finite precious resource but then Seattle is surrounded by snow capped mountains and gets a heck of a lot of rain. The noisy and annoying man who lives in the apartment above us has ten minute showers at 6.30am every day and we can hear every squeak of his bathtub as his moves around.
This man is a weekend Dad. Every weekend he takes custody of his two small children and they run around in his little flat above us with their fat little legs pounding through our ceiling. I take out my frustrations on the people below us by pounding my fat little legs on our floor and hopefully these tenants do the same to the reception area below them who are the ones ultimately responsible for placing this man above us.
We have a housekeeper who knocks on the door and appears with a trolley of cleaning equipment outside our door every Tuesday. She changes sheets, vacuums and cleans the bathroom. She comes from Mexico. In the gym I started talking to another tenant, Dan from Virginia. Dan is an engineer and his work has taken him all over the world. He was more relaxed at meeting a foreigner. Dan told me there are on some estimates 20 million illegals here mostly from Mexico. But our cleaner later told me she was married to an American so maybe she wasn't one of the 20 million. What do I care anyway - I'm just like her, trying to survive on the edges of the system.
Later I met Dan's moody Columbian wife Lina. When we all went for a drive in Dan's car to find Bill Gates house, she turned out to be more fond of dogs than people (just like the Queen). Anyway when Dan and Lina left to drive around the US they gave us a whole bunch of appliances they didn't want - deep fat frier, portable oven, toaster, crock pot, laundry basket and a huge box full of tupperware containers.
Now that we're leaving we've decided to give all this stuff to our cleaner. When we told her this - I think her name is Blanca - she told us fine but that she would have to smuggle them out soon. She told us the reception guys would take everything a tenant left behind even if it was left specifically for the cleaners. I shall stamp my legs an extra twenty minutes today.
And we didn't find Bill's house - secretive bastard. All I wanted was a few million and a job.
Humour in America
The funniest show in America today has to be the The Colbert Report - it has the most cutting edge writers and segments. In spite of the "special relationship" between the two countries, the perceptions of British culture are limited. It's strange watching British comedians appearing on Colbert or the Jon Stewart Show trying to make Americans laugh. It's like watching the Mr Bean movie or the American version of The Office. Honestly it's funnier to just watch Stephen Colbert here because there is an authenticity and integrity to the writing than trying to watch a British comic make it work stateside.
Recently, we visited the San Juan islands a lovely spot that I would like to settle down in one day. On the way there we pulled over in our rental car to a gas station near Everett, the place where Boeing makes its jets. Operating an American gas pump for the first time proved problematic.
I inserted the nozzle and pulled the trigger but like the crucial moment when the hero has got the drop on the bad guy in a movie, nothing happened. I decided to ask another motorist who had just arrived what the procedure was. When I told her I didn't know to operate a gas pump, she asked me if I was from Oregon. Not Mexico, or Asia or Australia but Oregon.
Here is a wild deer on Orcas Island that we ran over and ate for dinner.
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