#4 - First afternoon in Bellevue

Once at the hotel, after a quick shower, let's get to downtown Bellevue! Bringing our few dollars, we're taking a quick look at the plan, and heading towards the bus stop. Maybe as an effect of the distances in miles, we weren't expecting it to be so far. After a longer walk than anticipated, we finally reach it, but it's only a pole, without time tables. We decide to wait, and after a short while, the bus arrives! \o/

Once inside, here comes trouble. Buying tickets is with a machine only, which expects $1.25 for two or three hours of validity, and it doesn't gives the change. Since we just arrived, we only had 10 dollars bills. We were in to lose all of the change... But that was without counting on the folks on the bus! As the scene unfolded, people generously offered to help by giving us the missing change. And since we had to pay still a little bit more, $3, the driver gave us more time than expected. That isn't much, but it was quite the icebreaker for us.

While sitting on the bus, a nice lady sited in front of us described everything we drove by, what was happening in Bellevue, and she even came with us at the same bus stop to show us the way to the mall, where she pointed towards the good restaurants and stores, and gave us the bus time tables. She even said "au revoir" while leaving. Quite the welcome.

In the mall, we were just as stunned. Everything was simply huge. It was hard to know where to go, so we wandered glaring at the different stores, and walked while looking for a groceriy store, to take a little something to eat back at the hotel. While rambling, we were able to see how big exactly are US cars, when we thought that the Mini Cooper ATV was "small".

When going into the market, we land right at the ready meal shelf. Where we learn that "Entrée" means main course in the US (in French, "entrée" means entrance, and is the first course). And we learn that it's not only the cars that are big. We saw a sandwich bigger than my leg, huge chips bags, gallon-sized Coke bottles, ... That lived up to our expectation. We take some Cheetos, beef jerky, Twizzlers and some as normally-sized drinks as possible (which were hard to find, and just as expensive as the bigger ones, figure).

Well, Cheetos are awesome. Twizzlers and beef jerky, not so much. The first smells like plastic glue, and tastes about the same, and the later is... Let's say, just not fit for our European tastes.