Welcome to the Emerald City
From its retro Space Needle to the booming tech scene, Seattle has always been looking toward the future—but always with the backdrop of the lush Pacific Northwest. Luxury hotels, high-end restaurants, and art galleries are proliferating, and the city's vaunted music scene never went away (even though grunge did), making Seattle tourism more desireable than ever.
But beneath the new gloss, the city is rather charmingly faithful to its former self, and even to its celebrated stereotypes: this is still a place where outdoor nuts fashion whole wardrobes out of Gore-Tex and fleece; where hippies on Broadway rail on about The Man, man; where the whirr and hiss of espresso machines is a near-constant backdrop to conversation. It's this enduring familiarity, along with the shock of the new, that makes Seattle so compelling.
