A Sticky Seattle Situation

Seattle had a lot more juice so we got squeezin.

We started off at Fran's Chocolates. Apparently the completely real sounding The Book of Chocolate proclaimed Fran's as "the best overall chocolatier in the United States".

I also read some reports that Fran's smoked salt caramel is Obama's favorite candy, so I was patriotically duty bound to buy some of those.

We returned to the scene of the eating crime, and made another visit to yesterday's Pike Place Market.

Ellenos had some wild Greek yogurt flavors to try. Lydia likes yogurt a lot, and really every creamy food, so she was pretty excited about this place.

Beecher's was a fun cheese shop because they were actively making cheese on the other side of their front window. I don't know that I've ever seen cheese production before. They had some fun informative signs up that detail the process. Apparently "cheddaring" is a verb and is the process in which you press and cut the curds into loaves then stack them to squeeze out more whey. You then salt the curds for flavor and to slow the ripening process.

All this "curds and whey" talk reminded me of the "Little Miss Muffet" nursery rhyme. Well it turns out that "curds and whey" is another name for cottage cheese. With cottage cheese the whole cheese process stops before the cheddaring phase, so the curds stay loose and not pressed into blocks like above, and they aren't squeezed to get rid of all of the whey which is the watery part of cottage cheese.

I liked how serious everyone seemed to be about wearing masks around these parts. There were signs all over the market to continue wearing masks despite its outdoorish nature.

We got a grilled cheese sandwich with contained their Flagship cheese as well as Just Jack.

This beauty was the same blend of cheeses in mac and cheese form.

Apparently it was graduation day.

In addition to the more normal produce and foods that you would expect, there was a weird element to this market as well. The Giant Shoe Museum is an example. What the heck is this about? My attention was drawn to the depiction of Robert Wadlow, world's tallest man. He's from Alton, Illinois, right across the river from St. Louis. They are pretty proud of him over there, with statues and stuff everywhere. They also have one of his shoes randomly on display in a bar.

Rachel the pig is the market's mascot. It's a giant piggy bank that apparently collects like $10k a year.

I don't think I was even really looking for the famous Market Theater Gum Wall but we stumbled upon it. Maybe we were drawn by the smell of spearmint wafting through the air.

The Gum Wall made it onto a few lists of germiest tourist spots. I guess a place that is often considered even more disgusting is the Blarney Stone in Ireland, which we've also visited. Blarney required actual contact with your mouth so I'd say that was way worse than this.

We couldn't resist checking out the oldest Starbucks so we got back in line and toughed it out this time.

My understanding is that this is not in fact the first store, but this is the oldest. So I'm not sure if this is just some creative storytelling or what the deal is with this.

They had a ton of merchandise that was specific to this location and had the old school logo on it.

The Museum of Pop Culture, known colloquially as MoPOP. The MO thing is what everything in Missouri is called, such as MODOT, so every time I saw it here it threw me off a bit.

The Space Needle was looming large and in charge. It was built for the 1962 World's Fair. I love a world's fair. We were excited to see the one happening in UAE but due to covid our dreams were dashed. This will have to do. For a time the needle was the tallest structure west of the Mississippi.

Back at headquarters we carefully unboxed our Fran's chocolates and then did terrible things to them with our mouths.

I think that one has some friggin flower petals on it.