Alex Polson's Personal Blog

Amazon Anniversary Adventure to Pike Place Market

Posted: 2009-01-25T00:00Z[UTC] by Alex

This week is my fourth anniversary of working at Amazon. Most years I've forgotten about the date until several weeks later so this year I decided to go on a little adventure. As always there's some sort of necessary background first...

The characters in The Historian are constantly traveling all over Europe; partly for business and partly for the adventure of the book. When I was reading the book the other morning on the bus two of the characters were taking a train into Paris. They arrived at Gare du Nord, the same station that we traveled from when we went to Paris, and had lunch there, enjoying baguette sandwiches before continuing on another train. We had also enjoyed sandwiches which we often purchased from street vendors or small holes in the wall but they were the most delicious sandwiches we had ever eaten. They also, naturally became synonymous with our trip to Paris. While reading this part of the book I could feel my mouth start to salivate. I decided then and there that it was high time we make and enjoy some sandwiches like this so I promised myself that before the week was over I would take a trip to Pike Place Market to get the goods.

Early Friday afternoon I threw on my jacket and left work in search of the perfect sandwich. I hopped on a bus in the bus tunnel and arrived a few blocks away from the Market a few minutes later. When I was growing up and I would go visit my Mum at work occasionally we would frequent a French bakery in Pike Place Market called Le Pannier. I'll always remember the smell of freshly baked bread wafting out of the shop while walking in. The same wonderful smells greeted me at the door and I was pleasantly surprised to see all of the signs in the store in French and even the cash registers were adorned with French. Since I was in Paris the last time I had ordered something from a French bakery I toyed with the idea of ordering my baguettes in French but as everybody else was speaking English I thought I might get some strange stares so I opted to go with the flow.

While I was originally only going to get the baguettes at the Market I thought it would round out the adventure nicely to get everything we needed for the sandwiches there so I ended up buying fresh lettuce and tomato as well as some Black Forest ham and Swiss cheese.

Last night and again today we ate some very large, very delicious baguette sandwiches. Here are a couple of pictures of the finished product.It's strange to think that after having worked downtown for four years this was the first time I had really left work to go explore the city a little bit. It was a really nice afternoon and was great to see Pike Place again as I haven't been there in years. I think I found myself a new non-New Year's resolution.

  • anniversary
  • paris
  • pike place market
  • seattle