Background
my postings from my blog the world according to cosmos
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Seattle Travels
https://wp.me/p7NAzO-2W1
Family Seattle connections
I just got back from a trip to Seattle, one of my favorite cities in the world. I have a long family connection to Seattle.  My grandfather met my grandmother at the University of Washington and they were a campus couple before he settled in the Yakima Valley in the 1920s. He was German-American and fought in World War One under his German name despite the widespread prejudice of the time, his wife was Norwegian, like many people in Washington State in those days.
My father went to the University of Washington in the 1940s and was a student activist vice president of the university students association and led a successful fight to integrate the University of Washington. For that, he was rewarded by being put on the FBI list of possible suspicious people because in those days the communist party was the leader in the early civil rights movement and was in favor of integration. After the university capitulated and allowed black students to attend the university, they required black students to live off-campus or in black dormitories. Right after my father led the fight to integrate student housing. The. FBI investigated my father and put him on the list of suspected suspected suspected people. They interviewed my father's roommate who told them to go "f...themselves".
My father got a PH.D. and was offered a position at the University of Washington in the economics department, but opted to move to UC Berkeley where he ended up being my mom. He had been married briefly in Seattle and had a daughter who grew up in Seattle.
I went back and forth to Yakima during the summers because my father had a summer home there and I visited Seattle once or twice as a child.  Later in my 30s, I went to the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington and the Evans School of Public Affairs also at the University of Washington, My Korean-born wife and I became a campus couple as well.  She attended the ROTC and was commissioned an officer after graduating from UW. While there we met a lot of the Korean- American community. Seattle has long had a large, vibrant Asian community and is the fifth-largest Korean community in the united states. We also visited Vancouver a lot and Yakima, Washington to visit my uncle who had taken over the family's fruit business. Sadly, my father died in 1985 and we buried him in yakima. We visited his grave in Yakima in 2019.
Seattle weather blues
We liked Seattle very much, but only during the summer and springtime. The winters are cold, wet, and gloomy, with the sun setting at 4:00 pm and rising at 8:00 am. And we were gonna going to and from campus. In the dark, my wife did not like it. Neither did i, frankly.
I learned that in Seattle during the winter, the common greeting is
"nice weather for ducks"
because only the ducks like the cold, wet, rainy days. It rains there everyday for three or four months, but in the summer, Â it is delightful with sunset at about 10Â p,m and sunrise at about 4:30 a.m.
Revisiting UW
So this time around. I spent a full day driving around with my wife and my Korean brother-in-law and my Korean niece. On the sides, when we drove up from Portland, where we were spending the night and spent the afternoon and early evening. We drove to the University of Washington campus, took a lot of pictures, and went out to old student housing at Sand Point Way, located at an abandoned navy base.
Visiting Seattle Center
We drove down to.the Seattle center and rode up to the space needle and took great pictures, i recalled my two memorable meals at the space needle. In 1988 my wife and i went there for my last meal in Seattle after graduating from UW. I also went there in 1979 for a pre-departure meet and greet when i joined the peace corps meeting in Seattle before flying to Narita, japan and onto Korea.
Pike Place Market â€" original Star Bucks
then we went to Pike Place Market and the original Starbucks and drove around.
Great food
Seattle is a foodie delight town. We left town around 8:00 pm and had a delightful seafood dinner in, of all places, federal way, where we found a restaurant called crawfish island which had some of the best crayfish, clams and. And fish that I've had in a long time. Ohh no, it was a great trip.
The previous time i've been in Seattle was a few years before when we drove up to Seattle, spent the night before taking my cruise to Alaska. . On that trip, we drove around the town as well and saw the things that had changed. Things had not changed. Ohh no. I was very impressed with Seattle this time around and i realized why it has become  become a world-class city.
Northwest poems
I have had a long history
With the city of Seattle
Dating back to my grandparents
Who met there at UW and were
A Â campus couple.
And my father who attended UW
And became a student leader
Fighting to integrate the university.
I first visited the city
When i was a young man.
When we spend the summer
In Yakima
Where we had a family home.
Decades later, i visited the city
Before I went to the peace corps.
Then my wife and i lived there
For four years
While we were
Attending graduate school
At the University of Washington.
And we fell
under its seductive spell
Living and breathing Seattle.
Falling in love again
With the city in 1988.
We left the city
And traveled the world
Came back twice
Once to take
And pass the foreign service
Oral exam
And once decades later
To take a cruise to Alaska
And found that the city
Had changed in many ways
But the old Seattle remained
And i wanted to come back.
And now my nephew lives there
And my half-sister lives there
Adding another element to our family's
On-going Seattle family history.
Why I had been there before
I cannot say, but this much I do know
Seattle remains a part of me
And i remain a part of its history.
Yakima Dessert blues
Yakima, Washington
The ancestral home
Of my father's aller family
Since 1920.
Kept alive
In my family's history
Went back and forth
Like a yo-yo between Yakima
And the Bay Area,
mostly when
I was a young man.
In 2019, i visited
The ghosts
at my father's grave.
I did not realize
How much Yakima
had not changed
Ever since i was a child.
i thought that Yakima
Simply was too much
Of a desert outpost
Even then i knew.
Why my father
Had led the town
Rarely did I think
That my father
Would want to return
But, he did over
And over until
the day he died.
And was buried
In the ancestral homeland
Next to his parents.
But for me,
The Yakima of my childhood
No longer remained
The lesson learned
From all of this
Is Yakima
Remains in my heart.
Until the day i die,
i know that my family's
History in Yakima
Even now Yakima
The desert town
of my father's birth
Will not be
A home for me anymore.
It remains a foreign outpost
and is not anymore for me.
Because of you, i'm in a Seattle kind of mood
Because of you,
i'm in a Seattle kind of mood
When I look out my window.
And see the raindrops gently falling all around
And i feel that special Seattle kind of chill.
In my bones,
I think of you
With a Seattle kind of mood.
In the morning
Wherever I am in this
Crazy world
If i see raindrops.
Gently falling all around
Blue mood dissolves.
In the rain's gentle mist
And I cry out
With all my heart
Because of you
I am in
A Seattle kind of mood.
As I walk down the street
In distant foreign lands.
Whether I am in Bangkok,
Barbados, Madrid., New York, Medford, Portland,
Seoul, Taipei, Tokyo,
San Francisco, Washington, DC
Whether I am in China, India, Thailand, or Spain
Whenever i feel
The rain's gentle embrace
I get into that Seattle kind of mood
Seattle, a Seattle kind of mood.
Fresh salmon sizzling
Over a hickory smoke fire
Ivar's clam chowder.
And red hook ale
Pike Place Market
Bums in pioneer square.
Great Asian food
In the international district
Or in the U district.
And angry hippies
preaching in red square.
Yuppies drinking downtown
Geeks in Redmond.
Making the world safe
For the Amazon, Microsoft, Nordstrom
Starbucks, Seattle corporations.
.
And the Mariners
loose again
While the Huskies dream
Of Rose Bowls to come
and the Seahawks
Dream of a Future Superbowl.
Someday..
And everywhere
Rain falling down
Oh yeah.
AÂ Seattle kind of mood.
Because of you
I get into
That Seattle kind of mood.
In the morning
As I fight the horrendous traffic
And breathe in deadly, killer air.
I cough, cough, and remember
The green, green air of Seattle.
And because of you,
I get into that Seattle kind of mood
Seattle, Seattle, kind of mood.
The huskies
And the Seahawks
Are always number
one in my heart
While the mariners
Are always last in the nation.
But what the hell
I'm in a Seattle kind of mood.
I sit in the international district
Eating dim sum
And drinking ballad bitter.
Watching the crowds
Dodge the ever-present raindrops
Walking the streets
under their Bumbershoots.
Seattle kind of mood.
As I wake up
Each day in crazy foreign lands
I hear the falling raindrops
calling me home.
Oh why did you leave me
They cry out
In a Seattle sort of voice.
Whispering
In the gently falling rain
Seattle, Seattle kind of mood.
And so my dear
Wherever I roam
In this wide planet of ours.
From here to entreaty
And beyond.
All the way to
The red plains of Mars
Whenever I hear
The gentle patter of raindrops.
I'll get into that
Seattle kind of mood
And dream of
Spending eternity with you.
Watching the Seattle rain
Gently falling
On our Bumbershoots.
As we walk down
The beach hand in hand
Digging the gooey ducks.
While drinking rainier ale
All because of you
I'll always be in
A Seattle kind of mood.
Monkeys Run Amuck in Seattle
I am a member of Earth First, based in Seattle. We decide that we will do one action per month to radically change the environment and generate publicity for our efforts and gain recruits.
After much discussion we decide to liberate all the animals being used for testing at UW medical school and in other labs in the city and to free the animals in Zoo. We would take the animals out to the woods outside of town and let them run free.
We plan our attack with great care and we strike with military precision in the middle of the night one week and liberate 5,000 animals. We release the animals and film it on U Tube. The U Tube goes viral.
The animals run free and soon establish themselves in the forests near Seattle. The Tigers and lions soon breed and become established eating deer and other animals. The monkeys move into the city and the City of Seattle soon becomes their home. The monkeys do very well, and even survive the winter.
They soon become a tourist attraction. The zoo is closed down as they can't afford to round up the animals who have all gone native. The UW Medical school denied that they were engage in animal testing so we publish their secret research on line.
It is a great victory for Earth First.  Other animal liberation actions take place across the country.
Within five years monkey troops have become established throughout the US. Lions and Tigers have also flourished eating deer and helping to keep deer populations in check. There were isolated lion and tiger attacks on humans but for the most part the lions and tigers stick to deer meat.
Other animals also flourished â€" Elephants take to the Central valley and most of the African animals we had released were released into the Central Valley which became known as America's Severgetti.
The wild animals become a huge tourist attraction.
SubstackÂ
https://open.substack.com/pub/jakecosmosaller/p/seattle-trips?r=3i9lm&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
Substack Podcast
Medium
Wattpad
Seattle Travels
Audio FIle
https://wp.me/p7NAzO-2W1
https://wp.me/p7NAzO-2W1
Portland
Family Seattle connections
I just got back from a trip to Seattle, one of my favorite cities in the world. I have a long family connection to Seattle.  My grandfather met my grandmother at the University of Washington and they were a campus couple before he settled in the Yakima Valley in the 1920s. He was German-American and fought in World War One under his German name despite the widespread prejudice of the time, his wife was Norwegian, like many people in Washington State in those days.
My father went to the University of Washington in the 1940s and was a student activist vice president of the university students association and led a successful fight to integrate the University of Washington. For that, he was rewarded by being put on the FBI list of possible suspicious people because in those days the communist party was the leader in the early civil rights movement and was in favor of integration. After the university capitulated and allowed black students to attend the university, they required black students to live off-campus or in black dormitories. Right after my father led the fight to integrate student housing. The. FBI investigated my father and put him on the list of suspected suspected suspected people. They interviewed my father's roommate who told them to go "f...themselves".
My father got a PH.D. and was offered a position at the University of Washington in the economics department, but opted to move to UC Berkeley where he ended up being my mom. He had been married briefly in Seattle and had a daughter who grew up in Seattle.
I went back and forth to Yakima during the summers because my father had a summer home there and I visited Seattle once or twice as a child.  Later in my 30s, I went to the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington and the Evans School of Public Affairs also at the University of Washington, My Korean-born wife and I became a campus couple as well.  She attended the ROTC and was commissioned an officer after graduating from UW. While there we met a lot of the Korean- American community. Seattle has long had a large, vibrant Asian community and is the fifth-largest Korean community in the united states. We also visited Vancouver a lot and Yakima, Washington to visit my uncle who had taken over the family's fruit business. Sadly, my father died in 1985 and we buried him in yakima. We visited his grave in Yakima in 2019.
Seattle weather blues
We liked Seattle very much, but only during the summer and springtime. The winters are cold, wet, and gloomy, with the sun setting at 4:00 pm and rising at 8:00 am. And we were gonna going to and from campus. In the dark, my wife did not like it. Neither did i, frankly.
I learned that in Seattle during the winter, the common greeting is
"nice weather for ducks"
because only the ducks like the cold, wet, rainy days. It rains there everyday for three or four months, but in the summer, Â it is delightful with sunset at about 10Â p,m and sunrise at about 4:30 a.m.
Revisiting UW
So this time around. I spent a full day driving around with my wife and my Korean brother-in-law and my Korean niece. On the sides, when we drove up from Portland, where we were spending the night and spent the afternoon and early evening. We drove to the University of Washington campus, took a lot of pictures, and went out to old student housing at Sand Point Way, located at an abandoned navy base.
Visiting Seattle Center
We drove down to.the Seattle center and rode up to the space needle and took great pictures, i recalled my two memorable meals at the space needle. In 1988 my wife and i went there for my last meal in Seattle after graduating from UW. I also went there in 1979 for a pre-departure meet and greet when i joined the peace corps meeting in Seattle before flying to Narita, japan and onto Korea.
Pike Place Market â€" original Star Bucks
then we went to Pike Place Market and the original Starbucks and drove around.
Great food
Seattle is a foodie delight town. We left town around 8:00 pm and had a delightful seafood dinner in, of all places, federal way, where we found a restaurant called crawfish island which had some of the best crayfish, clams and. And fish that I've had in a long time. Ohh no, it was a great trip.
The previous time i've been in Seattle was a few years before when we drove up to Seattle, spent the night before taking my cruise to Alaska. . On that trip, we drove around the town as well and saw the things that had changed. Things had not changed. Ohh no. I was very impressed with Seattle this time around and i realized why it has become  become a world-class city.
Northwest poems
I have had a long history
With the city of Seattle
Dating back to my grandparents
Who met there at UW and were
A Â campus couple.
And my father who attended UW
And became a student leader
Fighting to integrate the university.
I first visited the city
When i was a young man.
When we spend the summer
In Yakima
Where we had a family home.
Decades later, i visited the city
Before I went to the peace corps.
Then my wife and i lived there
For four years
While we were
Attending graduate school
At the University of Washington.
And we fell
under its seductive spell
Living and breathing Seattle.
Falling in love again
With the city in 1988.
We left the city
And traveled the world
Came back twice
Once to take
And pass the foreign service
Oral exam
And once decades later
To take a cruise to Alaska
And found that the city
Had changed in many ways
But the old Seattle remained
And i wanted to come back.
And now my nephew lives there
And my half-sister lives there
Adding another element to our family's
On-going Seattle family history.
Why I had been there before
I cannot say, but this much I do know
Seattle remains a part of me
And i remain a part of its history.
Yakima Dessert blues
Yakima, Washington
The ancestral home
Of my father's aller family
Since 1920.
Kept alive
In my family's history
Went back and forth
Like a yo-yo between Yakima
And the Bay Area,
mostly when
I was a young man.
In 2019, i visited
The ghosts
at my father's grave.
I did not realize
How much Yakima
had not changed
Ever since i was a child.
i thought that Yakima
Simply was too much
Of a desert outpost
Even then i knew.
Why my father
Had led the town
Rarely did I think
That my father
Would want to return
But, he did over
And over until
the day he died.
And was buried
In the ancestral homeland
Next to his parents.
But for me,
The Yakima of my childhood
No longer remained
The lesson learned
From all of this
Is Yakima
Remains in my heart.
Until the day i die,
i know that my family's
History in Yakima
Even now Yakima
The desert town
of my father's birth
Will not be
A home for me anymore.
It remains a foreign outpost
and is not anymore for me.
Because of you, i'm in a Seattle kind of mood
Because of you,
i'm in a Seattle kind of mood
When I look out my window.
And see the raindrops gently falling all around
And i feel that special Seattle kind of chill.
In my bones,
I think of you
With a Seattle kind of mood.
In the morning
Wherever I am in this
Crazy world
If i see raindrops.
Gently falling all around
Blue mood dissolves.
In the rain's gentle mist
And I cry out
With all my heart
Because of you
I am in
A Seattle kind of mood.
As I walk down the street
In distant foreign lands.
Whether I am in Bangkok,
Barbados, Madrid., New York, Medford, Portland,
Seoul, Taipei, Tokyo,
San Francisco, Washington, DC
Whether I am in China, India, Thailand, or Spain
Whenever i feel
The rain's gentle embrace
I get into that Seattle kind of mood
Seattle, a Seattle kind of mood.
Fresh salmon sizzling
Over a hickory smoke fire
Ivar's clam chowder.
And red hook ale
Pike Place Market
Bums in pioneer square.
Great Asian food
In the international district
Or in the U district.
And angry hippies
preaching in red square.
Yuppies drinking downtown
Geeks in Redmond.
Making the world safe
For the Amazon, Microsoft, Nordstrom
Starbucks, Seattle corporations.
.
And the Mariners
loose again
While the Huskies dream
Of Rose Bowls to come
and the Seahawks
Dream of a Future Superbowl.
Someday..
And everywhere
Rain falling down
Oh yeah.
AÂ Seattle kind of mood.
Because of you
I get into
That Seattle kind of mood.
In the morning
As I fight the horrendous traffic
And breathe in deadly, killer air.
I cough, cough, and remember
The green, green air of Seattle.
And because of you,
I get into that Seattle kind of mood
Seattle, Seattle, kind of mood.
The huskies
And the Seahawks
Are always number
one in my heart
While the mariners
Are always last in the nation.
But what the hell
I'm in a Seattle kind of mood.
I sit in the international district
Eating dim sum
And drinking ballad bitter.
Watching the crowds
Dodge the ever-present raindrops
Walking the streets
under their Bumbershoots.
Seattle kind of mood.
As I wake up
Each day in crazy foreign lands
I hear the falling raindrops
calling me home.
Oh why did you leave me
They cry out
In a Seattle sort of voice.
Whispering
In the gently falling rain
Seattle, Seattle kind of mood.
And so my dear
Wherever I roam
In this wide planet of ours.
From here to entreaty
And beyond.
All the way to
The red plains of Mars
Whenever I hear
The gentle patter of raindrops.
I'll get into that
Seattle kind of mood
And dream of
Spending eternity with you.
Watching the Seattle rain
Gently falling
On our Bumbershoots.
As we walk down
The beach hand in hand
Digging the gooey ducks.
While drinking rainier ale
All because of you
I'll always be in
A Seattle kind of mood.
Monkeys Run Amuck in Seattle
I am a member of Earth First, based in Seattle. We decide that we will do one action per month to radically change the environment and generate publicity for our efforts and gain recruits.
After much discussion we decide to liberate all the animals being used for testing at UW medical school and in other labs in the city and to free the animals in Zoo. We would take the animals out to the woods outside of town and let them run free.
We plan our attack with great care and we strike with military precision in the middle of the night one week and liberate 5,000 animals. We release the animals and film it on U Tube. The U Tube goes viral.
The animals run free and soon establish themselves in the forests near Seattle. The Tigers and lions soon breed and become established eating deer and other animals. The monkeys move into the city and the City of Seattle soon becomes their home. The monkeys do very well, and even survive the winter.
They soon become a tourist attraction. The zoo is closed down as they can't afford to round up the animals who have all gone native. The UW Medical school denied that they were engage in animal testing so we publish their secret research on line.
It is a great victory for Earth First.  Other animal liberation actions take place across the country.
Within five years monkey troops have become established throughout the US. Lions and Tigers have also flourished eating deer and helping to keep deer populations in check. There were isolated lion and tiger attacks on humans but for the most part the lions and tigers stick to deer meat.
Other animals also flourished â€" Elephants take to the Central valley and most of the African animals we had released were released into the Central Valley which became known as America's Severgetti.
The wild animals become a huge tourist attraction.
SubstackÂ
https://open.substack.com/pub/jakecosmosaller/p/seattle-trips?r=3i9lm&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
Substack Podcast
Medium
Wattpad
Spotify Podcast
