Washington Days

Well, this update comes from the beautiful city of Duvall 30 miles east of Seattle. We’ve now been here for about three weeks and we love it! We were able to get here on a Sunday evening leaving two days for us to settle in before we got to business. We took a day to get familiar with the area we are staying and a day to go into Seattle and get acquainted with the city.
The Durant Family
We are staying with Sharon’s sister, her husband, and their five boys. I will refer to them as the Durant Family. We were in Chile with them at the time I was offered the internship and they kindly offered to let us stay at their home for the 2 months of the internship. We have enjoyed staying with them and appreciate their generosity. Mr. Durant works at Microsoft which has lead to some good insight and conversation as well as many opportunities to meet and network with other people who work there. I was actually lucky enough to get a whole tour of the Microsoft campus and shadow him for a day. It was really exciting and fun.
Seattle
We figured the bus system out. There is one bus that runs in the mornings and evenings that starts a couple minutes from the Durant home and goes right down town about a block from work. The only possible ‘con’ to the situation is that it takes anywhere between an hour to an hour and a half to get there. If I drove I could probably cut that time in half, but then I would have to deal with some insane traffic at the times I would be commuting, paying parking fees around $35.00/day, not to mention gas. It is pro for me because I am able to finally get some reading in. We stopped by the ‘famous’ Seattle library. It is an amazing glass building right down town. It is actually where I get on and off the bus so I signed up for a visitor pass and can check books in and out and read them on my commute.
Some other fun things we did were, bought a bus pass and some tickets to get into town at the transit center and then walked up to the Space needle just to check it out. We didn’t go up it, or into the EMP (Experience Music Project), but we now know where they are. On our way there we stopped by the Symphony hall and were lucky to catch the noon tour that took us into the hall while they were practicing and we got to hear them play for about ten minutes. Unfortunately they were practicing for their final show that weekend. They do have some cool jazz things lined up for the summer, I don’t know if we’ll make it into any of them.
We also explored where Sharon will be working. She isn’t that far from where I work, she is just down closer to the docks. We were happy to meet the people at the organization she will be working with and get a better idea of what she will be helping with. It sounds like she will be helping them organize grant information an important part of any NGO.
Basically we love Seattle.
4th of July
The 4th of July was fun. I didn’t have to go into to work so we loaded up the car and went with the Durant Family out to Ephrata to spend the day with Mr. Durant’s roommate from college and his family. He runs a big bee business. We got to go out to the bee hives and see how the whole operation is run. It is a fun and interesting business. They recently learned that their honey is what is being used in the new Haagen-Dazs honey flavored ice-cream. It’s a little on the pricey side, but I highly recommend it for anyone interested. It was a good excursion because we got to see the central/east part of Washington and meet some of the good people that live there, they were every bit as nice and accommodating as those we’ve meet in Seattle.
Check back soon because I will be adding pictures