I conveniently left out the part where, after leaving the Pike Place Market, I drove to Seattle Center and back to downtown again in search of the Seattle Art Museum. By the time I found my way to it, it was already getting pretty late. The worst part is that I walked by the stupid thing on the way to the aquarium that morning, and TOOK A PICTURE OF IT and yet completely forgot having ever seen it.
Dude in the front is a mobile sculpture.
Anyway.
So Friday night Andrew and I headed back to our host's place. Drank some rum and Coke, gave our decks a last turn or two, then headed to sleep. For someone who's used to California winters, Seattle's wet and freezing 30F was horrible, and waking up and SHOWERING in a heaterless house was torture. Nevertheless, we got over to the Seattle Center with no mishaps. We even found parking in the mostly empty official Seattle Center parking garage for $6. Not $6/hour, $6 for the WHOLE DAY. I admit we left the garage wondering if we were going to come back to a $60 parking fee for having misread.
The Seattle Center, for those of you who haven't been, is a weird combination conference center slash entertainment hub slash food court slash who the hell knows what else. It's where the Space Needle sits, and apparently where they host some concerts and stuff. Crazy big and new and well maintained.
The food court was attached to the conference center conveniently enough, so Andrew and I walked around looking at the Christmas displays that were being set up. In addition to the requisite Christmas tree and giant snow globe with leaf blower snow action, they had a really cool model city all decked out for the holidays. Being the Christmas dork that I am, I had to take a couple pictures.
(Andrew's favorite:)
I failed to take pictures of the actual tournament setting because I didn't want to get accused of cheating or whatever. While registering the decks, Andrew managed to trade for one of the last cards he needed and I managed to ... finish building my deck? There was some confusion initially over whether I was actually qualified (I'd done so, sort of, with the Berkeley qualifier on November 15th, and apparently it was only sort of in the system). That combined with the fact that I was the only girl in a field of 27 meant that they remembered my name for the rest of the day. Go me!
That was about the most memorable thing as far as my play goes, though. I managed to completely scrub out with a final record of 1-4 by virtue of the Round 5 bye. To be fair, it was not a complete sweep: my deck performed well, just missed the final punch. I went to 3 games for the first 2 rounds, managing to lose only by 1-5 health every time. The last two I played I sort of didn't bother to play carefully so I stretched my deck a little; those only went 2 games, but again I only lost by 3-5 health points. Alas it was not meant to be for me!
Andrew's posted his story on the What Games and Good Morning threads, so feel free to read up on those there. Suffice to say, his loss was quite unfortunate and put him in a pretty sour mood for the next hour or so. When they cut to top 8, they stopped to distribute prizes. Andrew ended up 10/27 and I ended up 23/27. I think there were two reasons for my awesome ranking:
1) My first match was against the person ranked #1 at the cut
2) 25-27 dropped.
I'll take my wins where I can get 'em! I was pretty amused, though. I was also further amused when the prizes were distributed. Despite being 23 out of 24 ranked players, I scored 8 packs (retail ~$3.95 each) and a deck box.
Andrew, with his 10th place finish, won a deck box, 12 packs and 4 Extended Art carts (Redemption).
Right after we got our prizes, Yakko met us and we all left to head back to the university side of Seattle. It wasn't until we left the conference center and were headed back to the car that I bothered to take a picture of Seattle's most distinctive landmark: the Space Needle. I knew I needed at least one of these to prove that I was in fact actually in Seattle.
We went to a Thai place called Bai Pai. I ordered a sampler platter that included banana and shrimp cakes as well as chicken satay and some weird shrimp in a basket. Andrew got classic pad Thai, Yakko got ... I don't remember what Yakko got. And our host got something which was a 5 on a spicy scale ending in 5. There was much great discussion of role play and science fiction and other dorky topics, and it lasted another hour or three when we all went back to our host's house. Our host and Yakko, both being from Michigan, decided to teach Andrew and I Euchre. Andrew and I proceeded to be confused for 45 minutes, but we played a very close game -- 9 to 10, with the Yakko/Andy team scoring the final points.
I still think euchre is a crazy game. I'm glad I learned it, though.
Once we'd had enough of euchre and chatting (how is it possible, I wonder?), we all decided to take Yakko to the ferry so that he wouldn't be stranded at the Seattle waterfront until midnight. Because Yakko suggested that you crazy DLers expected photos whenever other DLers end up meeting, we got our host to take a picture of the three of us.
Voila!
The drive home was pretty uneventful. Long. More in the sunlight, thankfully, which means I got Andrew to snap a couple of shots on the way home, but mostly just boring. The exciting part is when we got back to Berkeley (11:30pm), unloaded the car, then dropped it off at the rental place -- 2.5 miles away, after the buses had stopped running, in a semi-sketchy part of town. And then we walked home.
And slept.
And all was good.
Fin~
