The grungy Pacific North-West

First impressions of Seattle when we walked into the city from our hostel in Chinatown on a quiet Saturday afternoon: a small clump of high-rises, deserted streets, parks filled with sleeping homeless people, roaring overpasses and lots of cement. The city centre looked abandoned and the streets were gloomy and empty.

We found the waterfront, which was not beautiful, just your average fishing town waterfront, except for a scattering of touristy shops on several piers. Looking out across the water, however, we saw snow-capped mountains and big ferries coming into port silently. Cutting the waterfront off from the cluster of high-rises were two big overpasses from where you could hear the constant clamour of traffic. You had to walk under these and over train tracks to get to the city.

Walking home that night, we saw a now-familiar sight: a guy walking alone, singing at the top of his voice. Another guy approached us and said 'where's Everett? [assumed he was talking about his street] I don't know where it is, cos I'm on Mars'.

Next morning we caught the bus to a suburb called Ballard where we went along to Mars Hill Church. Mars Hill has a fairly high-profile preacher called Mark Driscoll and the church has about 8 campuses in Seattle, one in New Mexico, and soon their church plants in California and [somewhere else I can't recall] are opening. The Ballard campus was in a very inconspicuous building in a quiet street. It had lots of different spaces - the main church part, a coffee room, a large entry room with couches, another room with heaps of couches.

Ballard is the campus that Mark Driscoll preaches at live. His video-recorded message is then sent to the other campuses so they get his sermons a week later than Ballard. The church is known as a megachurch but the individual campuses are not huge. It's well-known internationally though, and they have a great website where people download the sermons for free - www.marshillchurch.org - and there are some phenomenal number of downloads per week. We'd seen a lot of Driscoll's sermons prior to this and were hoping he'd be there.

But he wasn't, and had pre-recorded his message. Often he does this when his son has a baseball game or whatever. But it was great regardless. His teaching is really great. This was sermon #81 or #82 (I think) on Luke - he's been preaching on Luke for a couple of years now with other sermon series thrown in amongst them.

Afterwards, we experienced Mars Hill's own very specutacularly weird coffee - I can't remember the name but it had apple, caramel, and something else in it . It was alright!

We went to the Space Needle, saw an IMAX movie for free (Born to be Wild in 3D), went to Pike Place Market and just sat and watched people for awhile. Near Pike Place Market there we sat on a hill where lots of homeless people were sleeping and watched as a guy approached several people for a 'favour'. We saw another guy crawling around finding cigarette butts and then sucking on them. At one stage a father came along with his two sons and handed out sandwiches to the homeless.

That night we walked forever and ever, about 50 000 miles I think, to find a graveyard that Bruce and Brandon Lee were buried in. It was closed. But on the way back, we met an old man who had trained at the same martial arts school as Bruce Lee and had known him. Nice. At the bus stop in the city, an old man with huge dreads down to his waist was smoking something and having a conversation with himself. Seems like there's someone just like this at every bus stop we go to.