View from Green Tortoise

We're staying in a hostel smack in the center of everything! I am agog and delighted. Wonderful train ride up. We explored Pike Place and then attended a concert at St. James Cathedral, a Catholic church like none we had ever seen before: not cruciform but in the round. Eye-popping. That diocese has money and uses it to create elegant grandeur. The concert, by a choral group called Opus 7, included choral work from the 14th to the 21st centuries, chants and antiphons, and one piece by my favorite living composer of choral music, Morten Lauridsen. The purity and harmonies of that group of 50 singers echoed through the circular space, vibrating in our bones.

I woke in the night trying to remember the lines of Fernando Pessoa's poem, "Ah, the first minutes in cafes of new cities." Sue was awake too, and said, "Go ahead and google it," so I did, and read it to her at 3:30 a.m. A few hours later we were out walking in the rain.