On biking

I got a bike shortly after coming to Seattle and have been figuring out the deal about biking around. I've been biking to work and to the store; yesterday I took my first long bike ride on some trails (maybe about 22 miles; it took me an embarrassing 2+ hours)*.

After some thinking, some observation, and some more thinking I realized I am a public menace. First of all, I go on the sidewalk a lot, which is apparently illegal in most cities. :( Secondly, when I go in bike lanes sometimes I go opposing traffic, which is also a terrible thing.

Since I had started doing both of these things after watching other people, I wanted to share this in case you are also a public menace. :o

* I have two questions: 1) how do you prevent the seat from being extremely painful? 2) how do you deal with being hunched over for so long?

The food situation in Seattle

I haven't yet extensively explored the Seattle food situation, but a cursory investigation reveals that it is pretty good. In particular, the quality of the "bar food" and the diversity of their menus has been impressive. Some places I've been:

• Barolo - a nice place to get a drink and eat some really good food. (Check out the menu on the site!) They supposedly have multiple happy hours where things are half-priced; when I took advantage of this it was pretty great.
• Feierabend - a great German restaurant. You know how I'm a sucker for a nice German meal with beer. (Unfortunately I no longer eat red meat, so the German food experience is significantly less enjoyable.)
  
• Table 219 - a great, well-priced place to eat and people-watch. I had a really good special: red snapper over cucumber salad with some sort of curry.
  
• Elysian Brewery - a nice place to get a beer with some good (healthy!) bar food. I had a great mushroom reuben sandwich with a good chicken lemon grass soup; my friend had a great tofu salad on soba noodles.
  
• Random Asian in Redmond - there are a lot of pho places and random Japanese/Korean places are here. I've been to a couple and they are pretty good.

Capitol Hill seems good in general for food; along Broadway (where Table 219 is) I saw many other restaurants that looked like they could be good. :)

This past weekend I attended Bite of Seattle, an annual food festival where local restaurants have booths. There was a really cool alley where you paid $10 and got to try samples from 7 different fairly nice restaurants (Salty's, Cellars, etc.); I am glad I saved room for that but the samples were not big enough to determine whether the restaurant was actually good. I also got to eat a coconut, which was really great.