Fish!

Fish!

It’s all about fish on our first day in Seattle. Be it at the Aquarium or at Pike Place Market, where young men throw fish around as if it was a sport. After all, we are near the Pacific Ocean and sealife is very present here.

When getting off the ferry from Bainbridge on this rainy day, we are first confronted with a quite enormous and aesthetically challenging dark grey concrete high path highway alongside the Seattle waterfront, separating the harbor from the city, looking like a big fence in front of the city.

We try to ignore it while walking through the drizzle which I like to refer to as the “crachin breton”, being the term for horizontally drizzling rainfall in Brittany in the North West of France where the weather is similar. Must be a North West thing.

Anyway, we eventually get to the Aquarium which keeps us busy and dry for a couple of hours. It seems a bit outdated to me, but shows a wide variety of particularly Pacific and Caribbean sea life.

We eventually step out into the drizzle again, leave the waterfront and walk up a stairway into the city underneath the highway to Pike Place Market. This, however, is special. A huge and lively indoor market scene stretches as far as the eyes can see and beyond. Particularly fascinating are the fish stands where the fishsellers handle fish and seafood quite robustly, tossing them through the air from one guy to the other, thereby chanting vividly and energetically.

This market culture has been the source for a coaching method called “Fish!” – as simple as that. It was developed in the nineties and is targeted at creating productive and fun working environments. My friend and coach John Faulk, who comes from the area, had already told me about it, but now, as I see it in front of me, I understand.

It is nice to get back to Bainbridge. And the best fish that day are the swordfish and the salmon on our barbecue.