Hello and welcome to my podcast My Life and Other Funny Stories. My name is Dagmar Tomášková, I am an English tutor and coach and I created this podcast for English students who want to improve their oral comprehension. As always you can find the transcription of this episode and vocabulary list in the notes of the podcast. 

Welcome again, this time to the last episode of the three-part series about my holidays in the US. If you haven’t heard the first two episodes, be sure to check it out because today I will talk about a few last days in the US. Let’s get straight into it.

So, we were on our way back to Seattle. I told you, it was not the best experience of my life but I think we managed to keep our spirits up. By the way, this has nothing to do with anything but one thing that surprised me in the USA and mainly during our travels was the public toilets. First of all, they were usually for free which was a nice change in comparison to the Czech Republic. But as Audrey said, that is the only free thing in the USA. Second of all, you know how you have the dividing cabins on the public toilets? In the USA, they are placed super high off the ground. An adult person would have no problem crawling under it. It was just a little strange because it was like that everywhere and I felt like you could almost see under the door the person who was using the toilet. 

Another thing was that if you were in public toilets that were for example in Spokane which is a city where you can see a lot of buses and trains from different parts of the US, you could find posters about human trafficking there. There was a poster next to the sink with words: “Are you being trafficked? Is anyone offering you accommodation, food or safety in exchange for sex services? Text “help” on number …. .” 

It made me feel very uneasy. It is really hard to admit that things like those happen on everyday basis in the US. 

Anyway, we got back to Seattle and Audrey had to work the next day so that meant that I would be on my own. I decided to head out to downtown Seattle again, get some souvenirs for my family, and visit a pop culture museum. Another surprising thing about Seattle is how walkable it is. That means that you can actually walk from one place to another. I mean, Seattle is a huge city but if I compare it to for example Berlin, even if you are more downtown, it is very hard to walk from point A to point B because everything is super far away.  If you are in Seattle city center, you can practically walk anywhere you want. I appreciated it a lot because I had been sitting for 12 hours the day before. 

I went to the beach, walked through Pike Market once again, and checked out Amazon workspace which is in these cool glass spheres and you even have a botanical garden inside. Unfortunately, it is available to the public only on certain days and Monday wasn’t one of those days. Nevermind! I continued to the Museum of Pop Culture which was quite expensive but it was really awesome. It had many exhibitions such as Nirvana exhibition, indie games exhibition, fantasy exhibition (where I could see for example props from Harry Potter movies, it was great), sci-fi exhibition (which was not my cup of tea apart from a real-sized Dalek from a show called Doctor Who) and also horror exhibition which was a little terrifying but I still enjoyed it a lot! 

There was also a whole section about music recording studios and you could try to play electric guitar, drums, piano, vocals in sound-proof jam rooms and so on. I spent like 45 minutes just playing different instruments and singing. I loved it.

The next day, we travelled once again to Audrey’s grandparents to pick up Audrey’s car and on our way back, we visited Cosco. Cosco is a store similar to Macro. But it is Macro on steroids. They have everything in bulk and everything is super-huge there.  You could buy a 5-liter version of a vodka bottle, tv screen as big as your whole wall, and a bag of chips that was as big as the upper part of my body. 

It was really fun to just explore things there but also it was a capitalist hell at the same time. Seeing people with shopping carts filled to the brim with kilos and kilos of food and things you don’t need was just strange. There was also a whole aisle of medicine for stomach issues. I guess when you eat the American diet, you really need a lot of medicine for your stomach. 

Then we bought some snacks because it was New Year’s Eve. We didn’t really want to go partying so we stayed at home, had some drinks and watched TV. At midnight, we went to the roof where there was a beautiful view of the city skyline and also fireworks around the Seattle Space Needle. They even had a drone show which was really beautiful. If you want to see what it looked like, you can go to my Instagram and see the highlights “US trip”. Link is in the notes. It wasn’t really New Year’s Eve in the style of “party in the USA” but it was fun anyway. 

On Wednesday, my last full day in Seattle, we decided to go for a coffee with Audrey’s aunt whom I hadn’t met yet. We met in a cute coffee shop outside Seattle in a small town called Mikulteo, talked for a while and then decided to take a ferry to a nearby island. Seattle is surrounded by small islands. Some of these are private, and some of these are occupied by ..ehh, normal people. What was interesting to me was that we went on the ferry with our car. That was the first time for me. 

We went to an island called Whidbey Island  and explored a WWII fort built on the shore. During the ride, Audrey’s aunt was entertaining us by telling us which movies were shot in Seattle or on Whidbey Island and what famous people she has a small connection to. It was a really fun ride. 

We came back quite late, so it was time to pack my bags and go to sleep.

The last day, Thursday, wasn’t really exciting, we just went on a small walk around the neighborhood again and then Audrey took me to the airport. We both cried, it was a mess, I hated every minute of going home. But when it comes to airport security checks and all these other things, everything went super smoothly. The journey back was super long but okay.

Alright, and that’s it. One more interesting fact that I forgot to include in my story was that in the US, you have storage units everywhere. Storage units are huge buildings that have small departments, it looks a little like a garage and you can store your things there. I mean, I knew that Americans have those but it was surprising how many storage units I saw during my stay in the US. I think it must have been more than 70. And I mean huuuge, industrial buildings just to store your things. Can you imagine that you have so many things at home that you have nowhere to put them so you have to rent storage units? It is a big business in the US. Truly, the land of freedom and capitalism.

And that’s it. That was my trip to the US. It was one of the best trips of my life and I am so grateful that I could have experienced it. I didn’t make many friends during my stay in France but this friendship with Audrey will last forever. I really hope that if you are thinking about going abroad, work or study in a different country, you will do it. It is scary and difficult but you might make friends for life who can become the best people you will ever meet. And then you might spend Christmas with them…you never know.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode and don’t forget that you can find the transcription and vocabulary list in the notes. Please give it a five-star rating if you liked it and I will see you next time, bye-bye.