MENNA HAGIGI finds life and love in a strange land
A Swede in Belltown

A little over a year ago, I was sitting in the kitchen of my condo in Sweden, preparing for a year abroad at the University of Washington School of Law. As a Swedish resident looking for a place to live in Seattle, I ran over a number of descriptions of this Belltown neighborhood. Delicious. Inviting. Metropolitan. Hip. Great characteristics I would grant great places like London, Stockholm, Paris, Madrid, or any other given European hot spot.

The rents were high enough to hold up to the promise. Capitol Hill wasn't quite me, Queen Anne struck me as a wee bit too bourgeois and campus was unthinkable so I ended up signing a borderline rip-off lease for a studio on Fourth and Bell. I would later realize how this was a life-changing event, but my first weeks of fighting the smell of cat pee in my studio, in this supposedly classy part of town were rough.

My impression is there's a divided Belltown. There's one that lusts for the cheap plastic imitation-wood floors in the freshly-produced apartment complexes popping up like dirty mushrooms out of the ground, ordering ice with their white wine in a desperate attempt to combine fine taste and quench a hopeless thirst. Another less glamorous Belltown lusts for reasonable maintenance, rodent control, and "Old World Charm." The old charm usually comes with the anticipated old-world chipping of wall paint, old-world mold, and asbestos, at no extra charge. Hip, Metronatural, Say WA?

I remember reading the Seattle P-I some weeks ago, and couldn't steer away from the readers' section, where normal people give their two cents on a wide range of topics. That particular week, the hot topic was Northwestern hospitality, and its accused lack of social dynamics. Wives of Microsoft executives shared heartbreaking stories of how the social shock hit them when they entered the Emerald City from other places in this country. No peach cobblers being carried across the lawn, no welcome, no nothing. A brisk hello, the sound of shaking and folding of an umbrella, at best a friendly look. Poor old Seattle took some serious beating that Sunday. Some of it undeserved, for sure. The only time you even acknowledge the existence of your neighbors in Sweden is when they buy a better car than yours and piss you off so coming from that, I wouldn't say Seattle is a particularly grumpy place. Cobblers, are you kidding me? My good friend Anna is with me here in Seattle this week, visiting all the way from Sweden. Her impression of Belltown is that of an alternative, open, friendly and laid-back part of town, surface-friendly and slightly uninterested. In comparison to other metropolitan counterparts, Belltown is fairly humble, she says.

In Sweden, hell would freeze before you'd get spontaneously waved into the VIP room of a nightclub without prior friendship with the bouncers, an obscene bank account, or at least sporting a good salary's worth of designer clothing. The Seattle version: We got waived into a VIP room at an undisclosed Belltown nightclub, only to find that nobody came up to talk to us in there. Needless to say, we got bored and moved on.

This Swedish girl has lots to learn about the social codes of this scene. From being totally ignored to learning how to navigate away from hopeless bar conversations at the Sea Sound Lounge with every other suitor, claiming to have ancestors in the ol' Scandinavian motherland to understanding why some obnoxious lawyer type in a hopeless polka-dot shirt thinks he owns the bar and all the ladies around it.

Remember the smelly apartment on Fourth? Best deal of my life.

Boy meets girl, girl meets boy at the Charlesgate Apartments. Awkward silence by the mailboxes. Late night grocery walks to Ralph's on Fourth and Lenora, picking up milk and cookies. A take-out meal at the Chinese Wok (Those were the days; the sound of beef and scallops on a sizzling plate is still haunting us.)

Courtship evolved into me staying and us building a nest together. I'm now resident European alibi at the patent-procurement group of a large Seattle law firm. Daddy's law school princess meets Seattle musician. Bang. (My boy is a percussionist). It's a perfect Belltown story.