Seattle Aquarium and Tents Downtown

I know I promised to write about the Museum of Glass next, but I discovered I have to try to go back and see the outdoor displays at dusk so I have to push it off a bit. 

I won't spoil all the fun a trip to the aquarium entails, but I will say that Seattle's aquarium was small but superb.  The tiles outside the restrooms were as finely detailed as everything else about the place.

Photography is always hard at an aquarium, though this one wasn't as bad as some others we've been to.  The touch tanks had a few more creatures in them than I normally see also including sea slugs.

After you're done gawking at the jellies and the octopus you can go outside to the attached otter and seal exhibit.  The otters were great fun to watch, one kept scrubbing its belly and rolling around.

 

The aquarium was $29.95 each for adults, and is located on Pier 59.  Neighboring Pier 57 features the Great Wheel, if you care to to take a spin.  The weather was fine for it probably, it was 50F and sunny, I ended up walking around for a few hours without a coat on.

More about that separately, too much for just one post!  Parking runs anywhere from $3-5 an hour and some spots have a 2 hour limit.  My first spot I got for $6 for 2 hours but then I had to move and pay $9 for another 2 hours. City life ain't cheap! A surprising thing we've learned about Seattle though is their homeless population pops up tents right along the waterfront near the piers.  We saw the homeless many other places over the past few days, and I'm not surprised to learn that:

Homelessness is a downside of the city’s rapid economic success, which has largely outpaced the nation’s since the Great Recession. The Seattle area added 234,000 jobs between 2010 and 2015, many of them at companies like Boeing and Amazon, whose growth has brought an influx of people working in the tech industry. That’s led to soaring rents throughout the city that have increased at nearly four times the national average.  (information courtesy of Time.com)