Seattle, known for its grunge and for Bill Gates and for god-awful rain, is a city that can sneak over you like an anaesthetic: I arrived for a three-day stay and came to a couple of weeks later, soaked to the bone, but comprehensively blissed by the place.
The city is on a fast track right now, with an almost sulphuric charge of prosperity in the air. You may think we've got a boom going on, but in Seattle, well, they've got a boom this big and its extent becomes obvious pretty quickly, just as soon as you spot the reps from the recruitment agencies who prowl the downtown area every day, hustling for Microsoft and Amazon, inviting you for guided tours and going "hey guy, can you, like, programme?"
The capital of the Pacific North West is awash with dotcom wealth and subsequently, when the city is at play on a Sunday afternoon at the Fremont Market, there can be an almost Roman feel of exuberant hedonism about the place. At Fremont, you'll see the phenomenally wedged Caesars of the computer trade boulevard and preen, buying jetskis and expensive outdoor stuff, spending small fortunes in dusty waterfront antique stores devoted to the gaudy plastic detritus of 1950s pop culture. If it's an original mauve and tangerine Elvis The Pelvis alarm clock from 1957 you're after, Fremont's the place.
Along with being a magnet for techies and HTML geeks, Seattle retains an older, grungier and conspicuously easy-going feel too. This is most evident down around the city's central focal point, the fragrantly boho Pike Place Market, a sprawling selection of stalls and cafes set right over the harbour. Here, you get a real feel for Seattle's astonishing setting: it snuggles around the hypnotic expanse of the Puget Sound, with the piebald Cascade Mountains providing an epic shelterbelt and the proud knuckle of Mount Baker looming imperiously to the north.
Perhaps as a reaction against all the technology, the city is something of a living Mecca, a kind of new-age Nirvana, and at Pike Place you'll notice huddles of extravagantly bearded, significantly patchoulied gentlemen munching serenely from giant bags full of leaves. You can have your aura photographed at just about every corner. Every way you turn there are reiki gurus and jin shin jyutsu seers, and there are so many astral travellers they've probably got their own air traffic control.
Leaving the Pike Place area, you'll find that the city, which is around twice the size of Dublin, fans out into a series of lately regenerated and newly funky neighbourhoods. Belltown is among the most interesting, maybe 10 blocks or so of book shops and stripped pine cafes and good cheap clothes stores.
Belltown is also where you'll find the headquarters of Sub Pop Records, the legendary independent label that kickstarted grunge more than a decade ago. The label also runs a store, the Sub Pop Mega Mart on 1st Avenue, and it's worth a visit for the entire wall that's devoted to Polaroids of visiting movers and shakers, including Kurt Cobain. Capitol Hill, a quick bus ride from the waterfront, is close to the inevitably disappointing Space Needle, but it's worthy of an afternoon stroll in its own right. It's got plenty of good and affordable restaurants, with something of an emphasis on Asian cooking.
Incidentally, the coffee cliche about Seattle is true and the endlessly replicating chains such as Starbucks can inspire an almost religious fervour among the natives: their outlets are treated like chapels, almost. It's extraordinary, the extent of the fad. Even some of the homeless stumble about clutching non-fat lattes. But coffee that tastes of banana? Why, Lord, why?
For those with less perverse tastes, Seattle turns out to be a useful city for the bar hopper and a favourite haunt of mine was The Sit And Spin on 4th Avenue, the deal being that you do your laundry and get slaughtered simultaneously.
So you pour yourself into the clean threads and stagger on down town, but midnight vultures will sadly find scant pickings on Seattle's nightclub circuit. It's a city full of pungently cheesy discos, with the more respectable clubbing events largely confined to the late night bars. The Art Bar on 2nd Avenue s not a black turtleneck in sight) is perhaps the prime venue: it's taken over by independent promoters each night, the top West Coast DJs making regular pilgrimages. The Art Bar's most popular event is a brekkie and beer shindig that kicks off at 7 a.m. on Saturdays.
During my last couple of days in Seattle, I became financially embarrassed and had to move from a reasonably groovy motel down by the waterfront to what I took for a kind of backpacker hotel on 2nd Avenue. It turned out to be some manner of welfare gaff.
I was in Seattle not long before the WTO talks and all the subsequent kerfuffle and in retrospect, there were plenty of signals that this was a place that could easily blow. Nouveau anarchists are in every cafe and bar, feverishly bemoaning the evils of corporate America. Back at my Cockroach Hotel, I chatted to one such, Sean O'Connor originally from Georgia, a Desert Storm vet who'd just left the army.
He was a wide eyed lummox looking for a fishing expedition to Alaska, where he reckoned he could throw together a simple life. He said he wasn't interested in the fancy pick-up truck or the surround-sound TV, he just wanted some place cool in summer and warm in winter.
"Anyway, all of this shit," he said, gesturing with a sweep of the arm at the cellphone boutiques and designer warehouses of 2nd Avenue, "all this shit ain't going to last."
Two weeks later, the riots began.