Top 10 Things I'm Going to Miss About the Pacific Northwest

Well here we are, just under three weeks away from the big goodbye. People keep asking me if I'm excited and my general answer is well yes of course I would be excited if I could sift through all of this panic first.

I've been spending a lot of time up in Bellingham visiting and saying goodbye to family. Trying to soak in as much of the Pacific Northwest as possible, gathering a little bit of home to keep with me when I'm homesick. I have been able to spend a lot of time with my parents and my loving and wonderful old GreyFace Mandy.

I know when I get back I won't be returning to the exact place I left. Everyone I know is in a major time of transition, whether  it means graduating UW, moving near or far, getting married.  The comfortable life I've slipped into will not be waiting when I return and the idea that things will not be as they are, that "normal" will be different is a little scary.

So I'm going to make a list in no particular order of my favorite things as they are in the Pacific Northwest that I love and am going to miss like crazy, (excluding people and families, that could get messy and mushy and we don't want that)

1) THIS DOG

I know it's cheating because I already put her in once, but look she's smiling!

2) The Chuckanut Mountains

Are a mountain range up in Bellingham and they are full of absolutely fantastic trails and views. They span easy hikes (like at Lake Padden) up to pretty strenuous (Oyster Dome, Pine and Cedar). All of them are lovely. 

Oyster Dome! Ahoy! -View west to the Sound

3) Pho

This fabulous Vietnamese soup is very easy to find in the PNW. It's cheap, delicious, and DELICIOUS. Thus far the best place I've found is "Time 4 Pho" in the Magnolia neighborhood of Seattle. The bullet holes in the window just make it more authentic. If you don't want to truck all the way out there, the Ave in the University district of Seattle has many decent choices.

4) The Weather.

Call me crazy, but I love the weather in the PNW. The only reason we complain about it so much is because we secretly are trying to keep people from discovering our secret. Yes it rains a lot, is overcast, foggy and cloudy many days. When it snows Seattle generally completely shuts down more as an excuse to take a day off rather than because we are unable to get around. I think our weather has character, personality and is really beautiful if you have the right equipment to get through it. 

5) Hidden Gems.

Fun Vandalism

I haven't spent a ton of time in the rest of the U.S., but something I appreciate about the PNW is that a lot of our cities have had time to grow from homesteads, to villages, to towns and onward. The addition of layers of influence, culture and infrastructure makes for some pretty spectacular hidden gems out there to discover right in your backyard or along the trail. It makes the cities engaging places for pedestrians instead of flat concrete jungles without a lot to offer a human experience.

Unintentional Greenwall - Pioneer Square

A tree growing over the "On-Ramp to Nowhere" at the Arboretum

6) Fairhaven, Bellingham, Washington

Is the wonderful Old-Town of Bellingham. In the last 10 years the city has done a lot to fix up the area and still try to preserve the old-timey feel. It's home to many stores considered almost sacred in Bellingham like Village Books, where many local authors come and speak and the Colophon Cafe in the same building. More recently there has been the addition of Bay to Baker, and the fabulous Sirena with a gelato flavor for every day of the week. The farmer's market and events like the summer outdoor movies happen at the Village Green, a small greenspace plaza in the center of it all.

7) Our Affinity for Zombies

The PNW for some reason has a real and true love of Zombies. From zombie walks, zombie parties, massive games of humans vs. Zombies on all the major university campuses, Zombie sporting events and Zombie re-enactments of "Thriller" in the streets of downtown Bellingham on Halloween. WE LOVE OUR UNDEAD. 

Excuse me, I was using the facilities and now I eat your brain.

8) The Suzzalo Reading Room

or the Harry Potter room as some call it is a feat of marvelous architecture on the UW campus. It's my favorite place to hang out at UW other than the quad in spring or the fountain when the roses are in bloom. And yes, I understand that it is almost everyone's favorite place to the point of almost being a cliche, but it's awesome. 

9) Our Nerds, Geeks and Dorks,

Up here, everyone is a Nerd about something. It may be rocks, or Harry Potter, or astrophysics, or Zelda or Star Trek, or Halo, or weather, or My Little Freaking Pony. But everyone up here has an irrational love of something. And that's AWESOME, very few people are too busy being cool to really love something with other people. We just had PAX at the convention center and it was a Mecca for Nerds of all kinds. 

Professors Lockhart and Trelawney I presume?

10) Canada. 

Having Canada up there is like having an extremely friendly next door neighbor who has better toys than you...and sneaks you drinks when you're 19. I like going to Canada for the all you can eat sushi in Richmond, the water slides and visiting the megafauna. 

This is a fuzzy picture of the Grizzly bear we saw just hanging out in a swamp.

Is that Switzerland!? No! It's Canada!

Cute right? - In Banff

Well I don't know about you but I feel better. I love this place, I must be crazy to leave it! 
But adventure awaits!


"Remember what Bilbo used to say: It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to."

-J.R.R. Tolkein 

(nerdiness in action!)

"The Program is Canceled" - With A Spark of Hope

About a month ago I bought my plane tickets for the whole fall quarter Croatia trip (yay!). A feat of faith in the trip and in my ability to pay for it. The tickets were $1500 total through Expedia, the cheapest I could find anywhere for a multiple-destination trip hopping over Europe a few times. I also renewed my passport because the last one I had expired after only 5 years because I was a minor when I got it. My new one will last 10 years. Make sure you check your expiration dates before solidifying your travel plans!

 The plan was to leave the day after my beautiful sister's wedding in September and fly to Edinburgh, Scotland. I would stay in Scotland for a week then fly to Zagreb, via Frankfurt and get a bus to Bale. Then in December fly back to Seattle via Frankfurt again. With my schedule set, and money spent I committed to believing in the trip and the project.

Fast forward a few weeks and into my poor unsuspecting inbox comes the bombshell. An email from Winterbottom explaining that our partners in Croatia, the Mayor of Bale etc. have pulled out. Leaving us with nowhere to stay, no food, and no building materials.

The project is canceled.

Winterbottom was distraught and doing everything he could to find us a new project ASAP but the future of the project was looking pretty grim, and we might want to start looking for  other options.

Understandably everyone in the program was heartbroken. I myself dealt with it by crying by a river for awhile. Besides the disappointing about not getting to go, I think all of us had already bought our tickets, and most of them were non-refundable. Classes here at UW were already full and a lot of people like myself had our hearts set on going abroad. Things looked like they were really going to suck. 

I and I'm sure a lot of us spent the next week refreshing my email every hour, waiting for any kind of news, good or bad. I started to look into other options for fall quarter, such as an exchange or an individualized study abroad, but anything like that takes a lot of time and planning. I was just about to try to register for classes when we got an e-mail from Winterbottom asking those of us that could to come to a meeting at UW on Friday. 

The meeting was fairly brief. Winterbottom explained what happened with the people in Bale, and how he has been awake for three weeks trying to fix this. He had two possible projects lined up, one at a psychiatric hospital on the Island of Rab in Croatia and the other in New Orleans. But it would still be a week at least before we knew for sure what our fate would be. 

Upon returning home, into my poor, unsuspecting little inbox came my salvation! An email from Winterbottom, saying that the director of the psychiatric hospital on Rab had committed! She wants us there! We are going there! The hospital has gardens already for food and gardening therapy and we'll be building them a healing garden! It's happening, we are going! 

The hospital looks beautiful, it already has a garden/agricultural feel to it from what I've seen of it from youtube videos and pictures on their facebook page page. 

We'll be flying a bit by the seat of our pants, usually Winterbottom gets almost a year to do what he has done in the last three weeks, and we are extremely grateful for all the work he has done so we can go do this. He usually gets to go a few months before and check out the site and do some preliminary analysis, meet the people and form some connections for us over there. Not this time though, so it will be one heck of an adventure for sure. We'll be doing some in-the-moment problem solving, negotiating, re-thinking and fast acting. 

This is going to be so cool! Only 42 days! Gah!

and here is a video about projects from a few years ago, very similar to what we'll be doing :) 

"You're going to be treated like royalty and work like a slave."

Wow. What a flurry!

Spring quarter has finally come to a close, and it feels like it took an excruciating eternity and was also gone in the blink of an eye. I packed up all my pens, clay, rulers, pushpins, food, and many sheets of trace paper from our Landscape Architecture studio in Gould hall on Wednesday; leaving my desk bare and a little sad waiting for the next first year to come along and cover it over again. Today I went back into U-District to tie up some loose ends like library books to the College of Built Environments (CBE) library. When I left I became aware that it could be the last time I go to Gould Hall until next January, quite a thought considering how much of my life has been lived there for the last year.

But enough of this sentimental silliness, on to the exciting travel news!

Tuesday we had one of our last Croatia meetings in studio before everyone left for summer. Winterbottom had been in communication with the hotel we will be living in and had answers to questions we had about our living environment.

He started off with a little talk on a philosophical note, that we will need to understand that we will be guests in this place, there are aspects to their culture we may not understand or even agree with but will nonetheless need to respect and do our best to work with.
Also, we will need to be aware of our infamous American arrogance! He said we may not even realize that we are being arrogant or disrespectful, so for the first while we are in Croatia it would be a good idea to stand back and observe rather than start yammering away. Like that quote, "God gave you two ears and one mouth so use them accordingly." I was a little surprised that no one in the group seemed offended by this. We all seemed to understand that the very nature by which we interact culturally could be offensive to other people, and especially on their home turf when we are guests in their town, region, country, we had better just keep it in check.

With that out of the way we met our TA, Carl who did the last Croatia Design/Build, is a graduate of the program and is also apparently a masonry genius. So as we say in the business SCORE.

Winterbottom gave us a bit more information on the style of design of the area, which I as of now don't know anything about but will fix as soon as possible. He says that Croatia and the general region have set historically based rules for design, that it's very formal. But the interesting part is most of their design is Beaux Arts, which if you don't know much about looks like this:

(This is one from Versailles but you get the idea, they are highly controlled environments where hedges and lawn usually prevail, clipped and manicured within an inch of their lives. You can tell what I generally think about the style but come on! Nothing in nature should be that pyramidal.) 

But they apparently also have a deep love and respect of nature with roots going back to pre-Christianity, some educated modern people fully believe that there are fairies in the forest. Can I just say that I would LOVE to design a fairy garden.

Also at the meeting we learned more about the town and exactly where we will be staying. Hotel la Grisa is going to be our home and home base for 2 months, and can I just say that it is SWANKY. (that link also has some great info on the town). 

We'll have laundry service, access to wifi and probably have our studio space right in the hotel with access to plotters (big giant printers for posters) nearby. They will prepare all of our meals, maybe even bring them down to us on the job site when we enter the construction phase AND we'll get a bilingual assistant to stay with us more or less constantly to help with the language barrier. Though we won't have access to the kitchen to make any of our own food and we will have to share rooms with one other person... and my diamond shoes are too tight and my $20 don't fit in my wallet. Basically this place sounds amazing, and we are extremely lucky that they will put us up and do all these nice things for us. 

Though I'm also very aware that they won't be doing all of this just to be nice, they are going to expect some serious work to get done for all their trouble and by gum I want to give it to them. As Winterbottom said "You're going to be treated like royalty and work like a slave." he was kind of joking, but also a big part of why we are allowed to work there. With an unemployment rate of around 18%, if we were working for any kind of compensation in Croatia other than education and experience there would be a problem.

We know a little bit more of the program for the site now as well. Bale is "The City of Butterflies" and has over 390 different species according to the Hotel la Grisa website. So the design will incorporate a butterfly garden, a performance space, and some kind of community meeting space I think. Still very minimal information, but enough to get the design ball rolling.

I think that's enough information to lay on you at the moment, thanks for reading! 

And if you want to know the answer to "Where The Heck Is Caitlin?" currently, the answer is sleeping for just about ever to make up for those last few all-nighters. Sleep tight internet!