Saturday, 9. August 2008.
The place Danielle and Ross live in is super cool. It's a cottage in somebody's backyard (literally) and it's surrounded by plum trees and blackberry bushes. Inside, there's pretty much only 1 space/room sort of divided in two by a curtain.
To the right, there's a compost toilet (there's no water to flush the toilet, but sawdust to toss above your poop or pee) that is composed of a toilet seat above and a bucket underneath. The bucket gets emptied into a compost container along with all the organic waste and sits there for a year when it's ready to be used as a fertilizer. Next to it there's a shower (this time real water; you don't toss sawdust on you, no worries) and a bathtub.
In the other part of the room we have a sink, that serves both for washing dishes and brushing your teeth, and a little living space that contains a table with a few chairs and a really comfortable futon that expands into a bed, used by yours truly.
Above, there's a little loft with a bed and then shelves pretty much everywhere with tons of books and games.
All in all, a lovely place.
In the morning Danielle is off to work so Ross and I chat for a while and he prepares us an amazing breakfast. Now, you have to know that breakfast in the US is seldom similar to a breakfast in Italy. Cookies, croissants, bread with butter and jam, milk and coffee,... that seldom pops up on an American table in the morning. What they have for breakfast sounds more like something we'd have for lunch. So Ross prepared a mix of tons of vegetables (both homegrown or gotten at a farmers market) cooked together in a pan. Weird for a breakfast, but delicious.
Soon comes Angelina, his friend, and invites us to go pick some cherries in a nearby park. Two more girls are waiting for us there and we all pick cherries for about half an hour. They're so ripe and so many that we get full bags to take home.
On the way home we take a detour to Angelina's place and I check my e-mail there as Ross and Danielle don't have a phone line or wireless connection.


A random wall in Olympia. Somebody likes superheroes I lot, I guess.


I get downtown in the afternoon and meet a couple of couchsurfers in a cafe. Funnily enough, next to me is sitting one of the girls from the park this morning that I picked cherries with! That pretty much explains how small Olympia really is.


Even the police station looks nice (from the outside). Not that I was going to check out the inside really.


This is downtown Olympia.


In the evening there's a weird show with 4 bands playing. Russ runs a record label called Bicycle records and one of the bands has done stuff with him, I believe, while another artist is a friend from Seattle. I decide to take a walk around the town and I run into Danielle who was biking from work. Another example how small Olympia is. But when you think of the amazing amount of music this town has produced (bands like Bikini Kill, Team Dresch, Bratmobile, Sleater Kinney, Unwound, Frumpies,...and record labels like Kill Rock Stars, K records, Chainsaw,...) it seems quite strange.
I get back to the hall where the show takes place and check out the next two bands that are decent but nothing that rocks my boat really. The last band is quite horrible and we unanimously decide to head home.