The Zoo, U-District, and Capitol Hill

The actual weekend of Robb's birthday we had a Seattle extravaganza. On Saturday we headed first to Seattle's Woodland Park Zoo. It was a very nice zoo with some interesting exhibits. I thought it was strange that there was such a large area with farm animals. I guess city folk see farm animals as a little exotic. Robb was also excited to go into the aviary and feed the birds. We like the gorillas, the bears, and the various aviaries the best.

After the zoo, we headed to the University District. The U-District is where the University of Washington is based and is a hip, cool, young area. The first place we had to find was Cinema Books. Robb is a movie fanatic (we have well over 500 DVDs, not including TV shows), so we had to check out this bookstore that he had read about. This store was amazing. Every book that had ever been written about movies, movie-making, movie stars, directors, etc. could be found in this cute store. The store was literally filled to the brim and overflowing with books (first picture) We spent quite a bit of time in there and then headed to a video store that Robb had read about. Scarecrow Video (second picture) turned out to be the biggest video rental store in the Northwest. We walked around a bit and looked at the different genres and niche movies and imagined what it would be like to actually live in Seattle and have that type of coolness available to us on a daily basis.

We then walked around the U-district, popped into a few more book stores and music stores, and then went to the Neptune movie theater. This landmark theater is a one-screen, revitalized, gorgeous movie theater that tends to play independent films. We saw the documentary Religulous (which was very funny and very good) because we've been wanting to see this Bill Maher film, but of course they don't tend to show that type of movie in the suburbs. The movie ended around 9:30 and we still hadn't eaten dinner so we started walking the streets to find out what was still open. We decided to try a bar/restaurant called Flowers. You could tell that the restaurant used to be a flower shop and they kept the sign from decades ago. It was a really nice, mellow atmosphere with phenomenal food and great prices.

After a very long day of the zoo and the U-district, we finally headed home, only to get up the next morning and drive right back to Seattle. On Sunday we went downtown and walked around Pike Place Market for awhile. We got our favorite Pike Place Chowder for lunch and stopped at a used DVD store. Then we walked from downtown all the way up to the Capitol Hill District. This neighborhood is another one that we hadn't visited before. It's a very eclectic neighborhood and is known as the gay district. It had a neat little main drag and there is probably a lot of the neighborhood that we didn't get to see.

We finished the day with buying our favorite cheesecake down in Pike Place Market and stopping in a coffee shop for cappuccino and wine! We finally made it to the Seattle zoo and to two new neighborhoods for us! All in all, a good birthday weekend for Robb (and I didn't mind it either!)