Seattle?

Hello, I visited Seattle in July 2003. I for one was not impressed and found it very overrated. If you\'ve visited other big cities in the US (New York, Chicago, LA, Boston, San Francisco etc.)it has many of the same things as they do. I found the national parks in Washington State (Mt. Rainier and Olympia) to be much more beautiful and interesting. I\'m from New Jersey in close proximity to New York so other big cities do not realy impress me that much as they\'re all pretty much all the same with a few variations. I did not visit any churches in Seattle itself but I did visit a church in the Tacoma area for Divine Liturgy on Sunday. It was an OCA church and was kind of weird in that all the women wore really long dresses and head coverings and the men all had beards. Not that hose things are bad in and of themselves just that I found it a little over the top especially since the great majority of people there were converts and did not come from cultural backgrounds that did this. I recommend spending as much time as possible in the national parks as they are truly extraordinary. Just my opinion. Have a great trip! Gerald

I enjoyed visiting Seattle. Didn\'t have enough time to venture into all of it - but I really enjoyed the waterfront. I don\'t agree with the mentality that says all cities are alike. They all have their own particular charm.

Hi all, I live in Seattle and I agree with gfglark3 that the best thing we have to offer is our parks. There are excellent parks in the city as well as outside of it, and some of the urban ones were designed by the Olmsted Brothers! (the same guys that did Central Park in NYC) As for the OCA parish in Tacoma, it is the one of the oldest Orthodox communities in the Pacific Northwest. So while most of the people converted as adults, the people who converted as babies have been a strong, loyal presence to that parish to make sure that the late-comers are quickly culturally aclimated into being an Orthodox Chrisitan. Their original temple was actually consecreated by St Tikhon!

I live just north of Seattle, in Snohomish County, and I work in Seattle. There are a lot of good parishes in the area. I belong to Holy Apostles (www.holyapostlesgo.org) a 99-per cent English Greek parish in Shoreline, WA, just north of Seattle, but still in King County. We have a lot of converts, but we don\'t seem to have problems with \"crazy convert syndrome.\" I attribute that to the wisdom of our priest. Come visit us!

Hey, allow someone that goes to Holy Resurrection talk about it! The original parish, Holy Trinity, is actually in Wilkeson. Wilkeson started out as a coal mining town and many Eastern Rite Catholics from the area of Galicia (part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) settled there. As well as some Orthodox. To make a very long story short, especially since I know not-that-much of it, most of the Eastern Rite folks became Orthodox. St. Tikhon consecrated the chapel in the early 1900\'s (1902 I believe). Sometime in the 1990\'s, our parish moved to Tacoma and started up Holy Resurrection. We still use the Wilkeson church on feast days like Pentecost and some funerals and weddings. Holy Trinity is on the National Historic Registry (or whatever the name is) and if I remember correctly, is the oldest Orthodox church on the western side of the Mississippi that is outside of Alaska. Seattle has its own perks, Orthodox-wise. St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Cathedral (ROCOR) in Seattle is were St. John Maximovitch reposed. The room has since been made into a chapel. There are a few Greek parishes although I am not too sure of the history behind them. There is a small ROCOR monastery on Vashon Island. Its southwest of Seattle in the Puget Sound and accessible only by ferry.