Northwest history meets Monty Python

A couple of Sundays ago marked two years since I moved to Seattle, and I wanted to do something to celebrate this little corner of the world, so the B-team and I went to Pioneer Square (the oldest part of Seattle) to do the Underground Tour. Here's the concept in a nutshell: the city of Seattle you see today isn't actually the original city. The first buildings in this area were in fact built at a lower elevation, closer to the level of Elliott Bay, on top of what was then just a bunch of mud flats. The tour takes you down below the current city level to the old city underground, while you hear about the city's history at the same time.

So as you can imagine for a city that got built on a swamp, it just kept falling down, and getting rebuilt, and falling down, and getting rebuilt again. As the Underground Tour guide lady pointed out, not much has changed in Seattle since then - they still build stupid things and then regret it later and want to get rid of it: Alaskan viaduct/520 carpool lane much? Pretty amusing. Anyway, they did somehow finally get some semblance of a city going for a few years, but then the entire thing burned to a crisp in a glue factory fire. This is where I got really excited, because the entire thing sounds exactly like Swamp Castle in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and this gives me a chance to do a quote.

When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show 'em. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up. And that's what you're going to get, Lad, the strongest castle in all of England.

Viva Seatac!