1. The tiny pads and free pens
Canada is the US's personal New Zealand. On the surface, Canada looks very like the US. Same roads, same street signs, same stores, same clothes. Only a slight preponderance for beards gives you a hint at the vast difference that lies beneath the surface.
After driving into the core of Vancouver and finding our hotel, we headed out for food. We had received a recommendation from one of Cath's colleagues. A place called "Sanafir" which is a Silk Road / fusion restaurant. Basically you are served a series of dishes based on points of the Silk Road which connects the Middle East / Mediterranean and Asia. It was great, enormously tasty food served by Bond Girls. I kid you not, all the women were supermodels in their own unique interpretation of the tight, black uniform. Any one of them could have met James Bond at the roulette table and ended up back in his hotel room, chastely under the sheets not realising this was their last night on Earth.
In Amsterdam, especially, the art-form has been lost. If you go to Dam Square, you'll see scores of "human statues" but instead of standing still in an intricate outfit with painted skin and stylised hair, you'll see middle-aged men in ill-fitting rented costumes, standing fidgeting on a box. However, sometimes they are so bad they become fantastic. (This is Rule 9 from Ed Wood.) My personal favourite is a man with middle-age spread, a Batman suit and a bored, dejected expression on his face. Only the truly ironic (or a rose-tinted child) would want their picture taken with this guy.
Today is definitely a slow news day. The headline of the Seattle Times was about a dead cow and sightings of wolves. 
We did some research in Borders and bought a selection of magazines, including the essential Bitch. This was one of the few Borders in the country without a public restroom. This is due to the undesirables who often hang out on the street out back and on one occasion set fire to it. Having bought some stuff, we were allowed to be escorted to the bathroom.
On the way we passed four random pillars. Someone had built four pillars in a line as if there had once stood an old amphitheatre. They sit in a tiny area of concrete surrounded by some trees and this seems to qualify it being called Plymouth Pillars Park. The pillars commemorate a church that was knocked down to make the nearby interstate highway. The church was built in 1891, which could have made it America's oldest free-standing building.
Fire engines in Seattle (and probably other US cities) are very, very loud. And if the very, very loud siren isn't enough, they have a horn that is even louder. The firemen all wear headphones because otherwise they'd be deaf. Even people in the street in danger of being deafened. But if any country is going to over-react in terms of safety and somehow add a whole other level of danger, it's going to be the US.
Our new hotel was equipped with one of the wonders of modern breakfast technology – the waffle maker. This one was about 30 years old, but still makes a mean waffle. Or maybe the reason is that it is so old. We managed to pick a time where not so many people were down for breakfast and so there was plenty of room. There is a constant need for strategy in hotels with limited dining space to come down for breakfast at the right moment. The trouble is everyone else does the same and it's quite common for everyone in the hotel to assume a particular time will be the quiet time that day only to find the entire hotel trying to fit round a few small tables.
The evenings entertainment was an improv show by Unexpected Productions, whose work I have admired before. They did a show called "The Improvised Man" in the style of Ray Bradbury stories, which was exceptionally well done, despite an audience of 11. Incidentally, I think I was 11 when I last read Ray Bradbury.
First order of the day was to check out. The conference being over today, we couldn't justify our luxury hotel any more. We left our bags and Cath went to the conference and the free coffee there whilst I went to a branch of Tully's, another local coffee outlet. I sat, read, wrote and listened to the eclectic mix tape the store played. One track was in Dutch by great Dutch band Bløf. It seemed unlikely to be listening to Bløf so far from Bløfland but I'm sure a local music journalist could explain it in terms of the local music scene.
I picked up some lunch-like things from a Chinese bakery and wandered through some more of the market. I watched some more fish being thrown, a giant squid being abused and tourists being scared with a monkey fish, before heading back to Tully's. While I was in there the second time, the chairs were replaced. Two burly, not-too-much-nonsense guys came in and replaced the chairs around as people sat and drank coffee. I assume they were official and not part of some elaborate plan to steal old chairs leaving newer ones in their place. I'm glad I was there when it happened, because even though the new chairs were quite different, I doubt I would have noticed whatsoever had I come back after the fact. I like to think I am that observant, but men don't notice the minutia like women do. Minutia like new chairs, new shoes, changes of hair style or colour.
In full conference husband mode, I made myself feel better about not being the main bread-winner by visiting the hairdresser. My hairdresser (or barber, as he corrected, although he had been a hairdresser) was originally from Mexico but eventually found his way to Seattle and has been cutting hair for 25 years. Because of the length of my hair his first question was if I was a musician. Nope, lazy comedian. Being a Seattle barber, he'd cut a few rock star hairs, including members of Nirvana and, one time, Kurt Cobain. Were I the type, I would have said "wow" and been part-, full- or even over-awed. It was at least a cool thing to tell the kids back home. And to tell the truth there is a modicum of awe as it is my closest, if somewhat tenuous, connection to a dead rock star whose work I do admire. I guess closest connection apart from seeing his widow in concert.
The barber asked an innocent question at the end about if he wanted it cleaned up underneath. I said, "yes" expecting some clipping action under the back of the hair. Instead he got out the vacuum cleaner and hovered up the back of my hair! I'm not sure if it was just a local thing or something only he does to dumb tourists, but it certainly was a first.
Due to time travel, I woke up at 6:20 am. I sat on the balcony over the sea and listened to the roar of the city. Like many big cities, Seattle has a background roar of traffic and... well, just traffic really. I observed a pair of seagulls clamour around the tin roof just below our balcony. One had an odd tendency to stand on one leg. In fact, for the first 15 minutes I thought he only had one leg. Every now and again one or the other would fly off or disappear under next door's balcony. They didn't even know or care that I existed.
At shortly before nine we grabbed some coffee from the conference breakfast area, and I attended one of the sessions available to anybody (only Cath had paid up, I was a conference husband for the next few days; Free to play golf and have tea with other conference husbands, of which there seemed to be none).
After that, I wandered around some more; joined Greenpeas; bought an ironic hat and some bubblegum cigarettes; and visited the bubblegum wall. I don't normally do so many bubblegum related things in one day, but when in Rome... The latter is a wall outside an improv theatre which has lots of bubblegum squashed into it. It's a local attraction and somewhat artistic and somewhat gross at the same time. Back at Pike Place Market, I finally got to see some fish being thrown. It's apparently one of the things that you must see and there are often tourists hanging about the same corner waiting for a new fish to emerge. 
For dinner we had Vietnamese and were happy to see that some places do serve more normal American portions. Nouvelle cuisine isn't very American, being French and hard to spell. And small in size.
Down one of the narrow alleys between buildings, we caught sight of a scampering. And sure enough, as large as life and twice as smart, was a rat. We pretty much saw a rat every day after that. Seattle is all about coffee, rain, rats, fish, tattoos and totem poles. Not necessarily in that order. Somehow grunge got dropped off the list.
In Seattle there are fish motifs on everything including most hotel pillows; and you are never more than a few hundred yards from the nearest totem pole. But the real motif for this hotel was the bear. Bears sat on the pillows waiting for you to hug them, bears leant against columns on the reception desk, bear footrests stood proudly in the room. Not a place to be ursophobic. I hear that they get a lot of large, bearded gay men in the bar too, but it could just be a rumour.
There seem to be a lot of runners in this town. We watched a couple jog up the steep hills. And then noticed a few heavier people struggling up the same hills. It seemed to contradict Cath's theory that larger people should be healthier as are used to carrying more weight around.