Bellingham, WA

We bought tickets to the Bellingham Festival of Music opening concert and a very fine concert it was. We drove to Bellingham (~ and hour) and arrived in time for lunch. We selected a curiously themed bar and lunch spot that was reasonably good.



I know it is shocking, but there are days of blue skies and fluffy clouds. There are just fewer of them and they are, so far this year, not hot days. I thought that these clouds above the federal building were especially good specimens.

Of course, Bellingham has back alleys as well.

An interesting place is the Bellingham Railway Museum. This is a small storefront filled with model trains and photographs. Some of the model train scenes were fun.

Kinda makes you wonder if the man and bear both see the same spacemen landing,

Here comes a train now.

Looks like this fellow is about to have chicken for dinner.

Back on the street to see more of those fluffy clouds, this time over an interesting roof.

And for reasons not clear to me at all, this rocket was sitting along the sidewalk.

The concert featured a young pianist, George Li, who was a Tchaikovsky silver medalist, played for the Obama's and Angela Merkle at the White House, and a received the Avery Fisher Career grant. He played Prokofiev and was most excellent. The truly great part was our proximity to him and the piano. The performance was in what is a large classroom/theater in the school of mush at Western Washington University. Like a many large classrooms, it has the stage area at the lowest point with all the seats rising toward the rear of the room. We sat in the front row in the center. This put us about 6 feet from the soloist, just behind him where we could see him playing. There were points where his hands simply seemed to be a blur of motion. There were also quite potions where we could see him visibly shaking, apparently nervous. Unexpected from a young man (23 years old) with such a performance history.

If you have an opportunity to seem him perform, don't miss it.