Downtown

I'm not much of a city boy, never worked in the "skyscraper" district of a big city before, so here are a few observations.

Most importantly, it doesn't make much sense to drive here.  You take the bus into downtown.  The company doesn't have a nice big parking lot like almost everywhere I ever worked; instead, you can park in a public lot nearby for about $30 a day.  If you work 230 days a year, that's $7,000 per year for parking, so it's not really even an option, not to mention the traffic into downtown (and out) is not pretty.  So starting day 1, I took the bus.  My Orca card didn't work the first day, so I had to pay cash, and Jackie and I probably spent an hour combined looking at bus schedules, and I haven't ridden a bus in years so I asked Lucas how it was done.  But that was last Thursday.  Today, my card works (thanks to Lucas) and I am an expert on buses.  They come every 10 minutes or so, you get on, get off where you need to.  Make sure the bus goes where you want to go.

I'm on the 19th floor of a 28-story building downtown, which qualifies as a skyscraper in Seattle, and I can see a number of the other tall Seattle buildings out the window.  It's a different look;  I'm getting familiar with all of these buildings I never really noticed before, and there are so many more than I ever imagined.  Somehow driving by or even through Seattle, it doesn't seem like there are more than about 20 or 30 big towers, but I can see that many out the window looking just one direction.  I think that normally the really tall ones (maybe 500'-plus) make you overlook the merely tall ones.

There are at least three to four restaurants per block in this area, because someone has to feed all those people working in a small horizontal space and a big vertical space.  I haven't really tried the restaurants, and don't have plans to because I'm cheap and bring my lunch, but it looks like fun if you had the budget.

The other thing I notice is the sheer number of people I encounter.  When you walk outside, you see a hundred people anywhere you go, on every corner, on every block, with constant traffic.  A lot of the people are waking fast, especially compared to me.  I am getting used to women zipping past me; people here are in a hurry.  I'm not sure why working downtown should make you hurry, but it seems to.

One other thing -- from what I can tell, people start later here than they do other places, I think because it takes longer to get here.  That means they stay late too, with the net result being that my workdays are going to contain nothing much besides work and commuting.  But contracting is about making money, and I'm doing that, so it's all good so far.