Seattle, For a Day

I have to say that I find few things weirder than getting on an airplane with nothing.  I have my electronic ticket confirmation on my iphone, no luggage to check, no carry-on to bring and a one way ticket.  It sounds like the life of a terrorist but it's also the life of a business person flying to a meeting for the day.  Or in my case, a lab rat pretending to be a business person.

And so two weeks after being in Portland I again found myself on a plane to the north west.  I was only in Seattle for 5 hours so a lot of the pictures from the trip were out of the airplane window, or parking lots, or airports.

 This was my first time in Seattle.  The purpose of the trip was to visit the glass manufacturing plant.  The day we visited was the first day that they were going to produce our glass for this year's bottling.  It takes the plant 4 days to produce all the glass we need to bottle a vintage.  It then takes us 5 weeks to bottle it all.

 This picture reminds me of the shipping port in Oakland, but greener.

This is the parking lot of the glass plant.  Unfortunately all their processes are top secret so this is all you can see of the plant.  Without a hint of sarcasm or irony I can honestly say that it is the coolest work place I have ever been to and it was so frustrating to not be able to document it.

I snapped this picture of the process in the lobby.  The scale of this place, the giant piles of broken glass that glittered everywhere, the giant furnaces full of molten glass, the conveyor belts that stretched for miles.  It was really impressive.  Each furnace can make about 12,000 cases of glass a day.  This plant has 4 furnaces, but not all 4 are necessarily running at once.

After 3 hours touring the plant and a quick meeting to talk about quality, it was time for lunch.

We found this place, Morten's Steak House.  It made me feel like we were stepping onto a scene of Mad Men.

Also, there was meat.

A lot of meat.

This was a window in the airport gift shops.

And if the aerial pictures weren't enough, I wanted additional proof that I indeed visited Seattle (if only for a few hours).


-Lucia