Thursday, November 29, 2012

Seattle, Washington

Flat Stanley headed to the West Coast to visit with Deana & her dog, Soco, in Seattle Washington.  He arrived on October 8th.  It was cool and sunny -- it was not raining!!  



One cool place to visit in Seattle is the Market Theater Gum Wall.  The Gum Wall is in Post Alley under Pike Place Market.  The wall is covered in chewed bubble gum!  The brick wall covered is 15 feet high and 50 feet long!  Some areas have inches of bubble gum piled up.  The history of the Gum Wall began back in 1993, when patrons of a show stuck their used bubble gum on the wall & pushed coins into the blobs of gum!  Theater workers scraped away the gum twice, but it was a losing battle.  In 2009, the Market Theater Gum Wall was named the 5th germiest tourist attraction in the world!  Stanley was sure to stay germ free, but he did bring back some special packs of Market Theater Gum Wall gum!  How cool!


Flat Stanley got to go to work with Deana.  Deana works at Amazon.com!  Deana is a "UX Designer", meaning she works on designing their website for user experience!  Too cool!  Stanley was over dressed for the day, as everyone wears jeans to work!  He liked seeing the amazon.com headquarters.  It was even cooler that you can bring your dog to work!  


Deana also took Stanley to the famous Space Needle!  The Space Needle turned 50 this year!  Stanley was amazed at how tall it was!  At it's highest point, the Space Needle is 605 feet tall!  At its widest point, it is 138 feet!  The space needle wears 9,550 tons!  It was built for the Worlds Fair in 1962!  The Space Needle has a gift shop, an observation deck, and a restaurant that rotates while you dine!  There are elevators that take the riders to the top; they travel 10 miles per hour, taking visitors 41 seconds to get to the top.  On windier days, the elevators are slowed to 5 miles per hour.  The Space Needle can withstand winds up to 200 miles per hour, or an earthquake with a magnitude of 9.1!  That's a pretty strong building!  It also has many lightening rods to protect it from a bad storm!  The line was a little too long for Stanley, so he was unable to go up to the observation deck!  Maybe next time he goes to Seattle?  


Stanley's last stop in Seattle was the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  Bill Gates is the founder of the Microsoft Corporation.  This organization helps people in need all over the world!  The goals of the foundation are to help enhance healthcare and reduce poverty.  Also, in the United States, the foundation wants to expand educational opportunities and have more access to information technology.  They even helped build a big building on Carnegie Mellon's campus in Pittsburgh!  They donated $20,000,000 to create the 'Gates Center for Computer Science' which opened in September of 2009.  


Thank you, Deana, for showing Stanley a great time in Seattle!  He was so excited to come back with presents for Team Lewis.  

P.S. - Stanley told Ms. Lewis that the original Starbucks was built in Seattle!  How cool is that?!  


1 comment:

  1. Great job writing it up! Darn it, I should have brought him to Starbucks, it's right down the street from the gum wall actually. :-)

    ReplyDelete