West Coast Versus East Coast

Much has already been said about this, and surely a few more words can’t hurt.

I was with Blond from New Jersey just a few days ago. We were in downtown Seattle, looking for a parking spot in front of Pike Place Market, at 3:30 pm on a Saturday, and anyone reading this who has spent any amount of time here already knows that that is…pretty difficult.

Most of West Coast life is pretty relaxed compared to the huge amounts of effort it takes to even buy a cup of coffee in NYC, for example, but looking for street parking at Seattle’s biggest tourist attraction at prime time can tend to rachett up the heart rate a little bit. Blond from New Jersey and myself were unfazed. I saw a parking spot open up at 1st and Pine, and she cut easily across two lanes of traffic, stopped, reversed—everything you’d need to do to suddenly parallel park on a city street. At rush hour. And everyone just…went around her. There were a few polite honks. We looked at each other.

“This is so…easy!” She said.

“For real,” I said. “On the East Coast, someone would have already insulted your mother.”