Seattle: Capitol Hill: Dino's Tomato Pie

Hello again, my dear blog and any readers who may have found their way here! I know, it's been an age and a half since I'd last written, and for that, I'm truly very sorry. It's been a wild ride here at 710 Headquarters, AKA my life, and I've been dashing all around with hardly any time left to plop my butt down and get to writing. On the upside, I certainly have ample new material to share with everyone! All this roaming in Seattle (and various areas nearby) has afforded me a rapid familiarity with the area, and some incredible sights along the way. Did you know there's a park here with a giant pair of cowboy boots? Apparently! It's especially surprising to spot from your peripheral as you wind your way through unfamiliar streets for the first time. This post, however, is about another location, one in Capitol Hill that we found ourselves standing in front of on a cold, hungry night. It's a little grungy, a little divey, with brilliant buzzing fluorescent red lights beaming through the night, guiding you like a moth to the warmth. 

I tend to spend a fair amount of time in and around Capitol Hill, whether I'm taking in the farmer's market on Broadway, drooling over the restaurants (and often bookmarking ones like Top Pot Doughnuts, Momiji, The Wandering Goose, Dao Tai House, or Bakery Nouveau), there's generally a buzz of activity and lots to see and do. Naturally, parking can be a bit difficult, which is why we tend to favor finding a spot we can leave our vehicle and go about our adventures walking, biking, or using ride-share. On this particular outing, we'd gone all the way down to MoPOP to take in their limited run Marvel exhibition while it was still going on, and then walked our way back up and then along much of Denny Hill. It was during this uphill slog that we happened upon Dino's Tomato Pie, a dimly lit bar and restaurant slinging up round or square pies in a variety of different topping arrangements. Our tummies grumbling in hunger, and our glutes barking, we opted to take a brief load off and refuel. Our timing was fortuitous, as it was happy hour and we were able to grab a couple of cold brews and some garlic knots along with our slices at a reasonable price. Costs in Capitol Hill haven't exactly remained low over the years, so it's always nice to know there's a place to grab a good meal without breaking the bank. If you want to hop in a time machine, I highly recommend checking out their website, which is a shrine to a bygone era in internet aesthetics. So many blinking items and all the scrolling text! The gifs! It's a site to behold, friends. 

You'll have to go up to the bar and flag the attention of one of the employees to place your order, but there's a handy sign to guide you in the darkness. The food was delicious, and we totally enjoyed the dive bar vibe. The crew seemed to have a good banter going, and their menu was pretty extensive, with a lot of different choices for everyone. We kept it simple with our happy hour brewskies, but they had a pretty impressive cocktail menu with some creative offerings if that's more your thing. 

Seattle: AJ's Day out around Capitol Hill

Capitol Hill is one of the trendier neighborhoods of Seattle, rife with hipsters, indie cafes, local coffee shops, tongue-in-cheek gay bars with outlandish names, a weekly farmer's market, and SO MUCH ART! There's a lot to do around the area, and parking isn't exactly the easiest thing to find, or cheapest if you end up having to opt for one of the long-term parking lots, but there is so much to see and do in the area that it ends up being almost kind of totally worth the exorbitant parking rates depending on what you do or the day you visit. I had a gig to attend to, so I was going to be busy for at least 3 hours, while Antho was free to roam around the area and partake of the local culture. He had a lot of fun and got a ton of awesome photos capturing the colorful vibe and ecclectic nature of the area. 

On our way to get there, we passed this friendly fellow who was happily feeding the gulls. He'd forged a sort of kinship with the birds, and was ensuring they got plenty of snacks on this awkward little bit of corner. We had a nice chat with him before we moved on with the flow of traffic, and I like to think he's carrying on a piece of Ivar's legacy, as the founder of Ivar's was a fan of seagulls, too. 

One of the first things to catch Antho's eye during his explorations were the streetlights and posts, which were predominantly wrapped up in deep layers of flyers. Each proceeding generation of flyer had seemingly just been stapled, spackled, or otherwise smashed on top of the previous generation, causing the heavily trafficked corners to have poles over-stuffed in decaying layers of flapping paper, advertising months, if not years, worth of local events and entertainment. There is no order to the chaos, other than the chronological necessity of the most recent things landing on top of the pile, only to be covered up by the next big thing. 

So it goes. 

Plenty of photos below!

Japan: Ginza with Yuka 2012-06-28

The view of Ginza from the restaurant we had our dinner in, including the famous "Marui" building.

Ginza's name is derived from the silver coin mints that filled the area in it's earlier years and now-a-days it's a ritzy, classy neighborhood with glittering high-rises and gussied up pedestrians dipping into high-end restaurants or shops. It's not unusual to see women in fancy kimono or exorbitantly priced stilettos strutting the streets of Ginza. Even with it's high-class image, there are still plenty of reasonably priced activities and shops to take in!

There's even pineapples!

Youth Hostel Central, 116 Turk, San Francisco

After all the fun we had at the Exploratorium, we headed back to the Tenderloin to check in at Youth Hostel Central. I've heard a lot of overblown warnings about "bad" neighborhoods in the past and never really felt threatened or uncomfortable in any area of Hong Kong, Seoul, Japan, London or Tijuana that I explored but perhaps I was lucky. For the most part, that was true enough of the Tenderloin, too, though I did notice some guys tried to intimidate Antho as they walked past us…