Last weekend

Well, thought I'd give you (and maybe myself) a break from daily blog posts. That's why I hadn't posted the past few days.
But anyway, the break is over so here we go :)

I briefly mentioned how the last weekend was kinda busy and fun. I'm gonna elaborate on the subject a bit, and then maybe post a few lousy pics as usual :)

So last weekend we had a visitor actually, Helal's friend happened to be in Texas so he flew over for the weekend before he went back to Egypt.

Of course we'd only been here for less than a month, but we had to act like pros and show him around. That was quite a challenge actually seeing that we still get lost very easily around here and had only been to a handful of places.

So anyway, with the help of friends here we were able to come up with something.

We picked Murad up from Sea-Tac airport (his name is Murad and I'm gonna start using it now) and first went back home. It was already past 9 so any hopes of going somewhere in Redmond were long gone (except maybe the nearest safeway supermarket as it opens 24/7) We decided we'd hit a pub in Seattle. We looked around on the Internet (yeah, what's a geek to do) and found this place called delrey. Looked good so we took the 15 minute way to Seattle, spent 30 minutes looking for parking and we were there. The reality was just a teeny tiny bit different than what we had in our minds. I mean the site said "crowded: yes", instead it should have said "crowded: extremely beyond imagination" maybe.

Seriously, the place was full of people, everyone standing (no places to sit) and just having drinks and talking. It was extremely noisy too. And you'd stand in line for the bar tender to wait on you for like 15 minutes. Anyway it was still fun, very different, would have been even more fun with a bit "softer" group, if you know what I mean, but anyway. We stayed for like 2 hours and then went back.

Next day was shopping day, Murad needed to go shop for stuff for himself and people back in Egypt and of course I am always up for shopping. We went to this huge place called Seattle Premium outlets. I'd seen some outlets here before but this is like a horizontal mall of outlets, they had virtually everything, I mean cloths-wise you could find Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, Burberry, Tommy Hilfiger, Gap, Levi's, Dockers, Aeropostale, Quiksilver, Nike, Adidas, Banana Republic, and that's just off the top of my head.
So we spent from noon to 7 pm shopping, came back home, had some dinner/late lunch. We were then too tired to go elsewhere so we just stayed in, invited a couple of friends and had an intense Xbox gaming session. Dead Or Alive and Burnout are always so much fun in multiplayer modes.

Next day we were planning a hike, we'd originally planned on going to Mount Rainier national park, but we woke up late and we'd made reservations at Skycity in Seattle's space needle for dinner. So we had to be back at home at 5 to change (business casual dress code is in effect at skycity).

So we decided on Marymoor park instead, as it's very close to where we live. Marymoor park turned out to be a very good park indeed. They have one of the very few off-leash dog areas in the states. And it's not too small either. I also found out that Microsoft covers every acre of Marymoor park with free wifi internet access. Really dunno how or why they did that but it's just the facts.
So we played with the dogs, walked along the well treaded path for the best part of 3 hours and then went back home.

We made it at Skycity just in time for our reservations. We were 5 people. Skycity is probably the American version of the revolving restaurant in Grand Hayat in Egypt for the Egyptians amongst you. Actually the revolving restaurant might be the Egyptian version of Skycity, but anyway, you get the idea.

Food was good enough, the appetizers were exceptionally good though. We had a fun dinner looking at an extremely nice view of Seattle city. We went back home and I wrote the blog post that appears just below this one :)

So this turned out to be kinda prequel post.

Anyway, I'll leave you with some photos of Marymoor park and will "see" you soon in a later post.


Helal, Mustafa, and I (left to right) at marymoor park



Mustafa, Helal, and Murad walking down the trail.






The four of us at the end of the trail, behind us is lake Sammamish



More nature at marymoor park, you probably noticed I'm always behind. That's because of all the pics I take, they'd just stopped waiting for me, arghhhhh.


And of course, the post wouldn't be complete without a photo of my new girlfriend :)



See? I'm a good sportsman and I let my friends photograph with her :)



See you guys.