akirlu | Four Things I Like About Living in Kent (Reply)

This is a cross-post from

life_in_kent -- things are a bit moribund over there (to say the least), so I thought I'd wander in and get something started. In particular, since there are a bunch of things I like about living in Kent -- you'd have to hope so, since we so doggedly pursued finding a house here -- I figured I could just concatenate some of them into a Four Things post. And so, dear friends, I give you:

Four Things I Like About Living in Kent

Russian Tea at The Velvet Goose. I thought what made tea Russian was sweetening it with jam, and drinking it out of glasses, but apparently that's not the only Russian trick with tea. This stuff is brewed up with a stick of cinnamon in the water, and the brewed tea is flavored and sweetened with orange juice, so that the spicy, aromatic result is wonderfully cosy on a wet, bone-chilling afternoon. And it is served in a glass. Once at the Goose, I generally spend at least a few minutes poking around the Mad Hatter antique mall in the same building.

The parking lot at the Kent branch of the King County Library. It's full. Completely packed whenever I go. Normally navigating a crowded parking lot only makes me crazy. But the charm of a library that's so popular at all hours and on all days that you can't find a place to park on a Saturday afternoon, so popular that a crowd forms outside the doors waiting for opening on Sunday, that wins me over. There are a lot of people who read in Kent. I like that.

Sunday Brunch at Wild Wheat. Best. Blintzes. Evar. You can get them with half-and-half of whatever fruit you prefer. I recommend strawberry and marionberry. And all the breads they bake are crusty, fresh, and perfect. If you're drinking hot tea (notice the tea theme working here), the water comes in a decent sized teapot, rather than one of those weedy little cup-and-a-half jobbers. The staff is always friendly, which makes up for the occasional lapses in service.

Thrifting on Meeker. Our old Christmas tree stand went astray in the move. So I picked up a used one at Meeker Street Emporium -- better than the old one, actually. I got it for $1.31. Yeah.