We clearly don't get it, is all

We have arrived safely in Seattle, and are being comfortably hosted for the next day or so by a lovely friend of mine from highschool and his lovely lady love. 

We are three hours earlier than them, time-wise, and they hadn't gotten to sleep in for weeks. So today we got up early and wandered out to get our own coffee (because apparently we're staying with the only couple in Seattle that isn't addicted to the beans of life). 

We went to Starbucks. We had cards for free stuff, and if not here, where? 

Sitting there by the big picture window, we watched a little bit of Seattle go by. There was a very tall man with very blond rather long hair and a large chain mail neck piece, who may well have been Thor in disguise. There was a bickering constellation of people whose relationship to each other we could not figure out. 

And then we saw a man in a track suit and a kid about six walking along. The man ended up walking ahead of the kid, and then another man, wearing a knit hat with longish curly hair, a sort of bum about town kinda feller, came up behind the kid and touched him on the shoulders, and then the kid ran to the guy in the track suit, who we figured was the dad, who scooped him up onto his back and crossed the street, and seemed to shout back at the other guy. We figured this was some sort of threat type thing, "You touch my kid again and I'll call the cops" or something. And then, later, the track suit guy and the kid were back! And chatting with another rough-and tumble sort of group, in hoodies with metal studs and other such items. And we thought, hum? were we wrong? The original guy wasn't with 'em, so we couldn't tell. Until he wandered up, and continued interacting with both dad and kid with no apparent trouble on either side, and we realized that we East Coast types are clearly just not in the loop here. 

And that is all. Today we will I think visit the Utilikilt factory, and eat some food and see some stuff and maybe start to get a better feel for what is going on when people interact with each other out here. 

It smells like the West Coast, but not as strongly as California does.