Ok, so what does one do with a week in Seattle? Well, quite a lot it seems. On my first night, I arrived in the city quite late and only had time for a quick look around before falling into bed exhausted from a long day of airport delays and all the other delights associated with travel. Over the last few days, however, I have had a proper chance to become acquainted with the city and to get well and truly lost among its streets. Being Sunday, the city was relatively quiet on my first day here until the afternoon - although all the shops were open and doing a brisk Sunday trade. Arising at around mid-day, I made my way to the downtown area - only three blocks away from the hotel - and didn't end up returning until late evening due to the sheer size of the place and the amount of aimless wandering I ended up doing. You can always tell that you're going to like a city when you're able to spend the day exploring its backstreets, walking through parks full of statues and lakes and darting down interesting looking alleys lined with old buildings until you end up totally losing track of time. In fact, I managed to get myself hopelessly lost for much of the afternoon and ended up having to find my way back to the hotel by asking someone to point me in the right direction at each intersection - but I really didn't care.

The city seemed happy and carefree as I spent my first day orienting myself without the bustle of weekday traffic to confuse me. I poked my nose into a few shops, found out where the waterfront was, and discovered that the coffee shop is the centre of culture for most Seattleites and that the patrons are happy to spend their Sunday afternoons sitting downtown in a branch of Tully's reading a newspaper and sipping a cappuccino without a care in the world. Nobody, it seems, was going to even think about asking them to drink up and move on, suggesting as they would back home that they might like to vacate the table for somebody else. Instead, the waiter was more likely to casually saunter over to wipe down the table and ask if they knew the result of last night's big game.

It isn't just the ever-present coffee shops which make for a somewhat different social life in Seattle - even the nightclub seems to be undergoing something of a change of tactic, and you can certainly see the influence of Bill Gates living in his multimillion dollar mansion overlooking Lake Washington. One of the places I've discovered here is an establishment called Gameworks - a rather odd attempt to combine the coffee, pub and nightclub cultures together and throw in a load of modern computerisation for good measure. Imagine a huge, two storey space age nightclub with a dance floor and bars arranged around both levels. Now, fill it with all the latest videogames, virtual reality machines, fairground rides and attractions. Add in a restaurant, and then integrate everything together so that patrons can play Virtua-Fighter while eating a meal and having a beer, saunter over to the dance floor to show off some moves and ask a member of the opposite sex if they come here often, and then finish the night by chatting to friends over a coffee in a plush lounge area filled with sofas and videogames from yesteryear. I spent my first full night in Seattle at Gameworks and loved every minute of it - it didn't feel as though I was in a club, instead giving the impression that I was part of some giant social network. Whenever I played a videogame, people came to watch what I was doing. Whenever I went to the dancefloor, people welcomed me in and started dancing with me. Whenever I went to the bar, people asked why they hadn't seen me before and engaged me in conversation. Surely there must be a reason why concepts like this only seem to exist in America. I was looking for a great way to sum up GameWorks in a single line, but the large neon street sign outside which I had somehow missed on the way in seems to have done it for me:

GAMEWORKS: GAMES. DATES. BEER. IT'S JUST LIKE COLLEGE

Perhaps the single most interesting thing to do in Seattle is also one of its least well known - the underground tour. Starting in what I like to call the old college district due to the fact that it seems to be the hub of activity for city students, and also where most of the bars are, the underground tour takes visitors down into the subterranean depths of the old city. Tour parties regularly meet in one of the local pubs and are led by an experienced guide down through a cellar into the buried streets of old Seattle. I think it's fair to say that most people don't realise, as they go about their everyday business on the streets of Seattle, that beneath their feet lie the streets of the old nineteenth century city.

Originally, as was the trend at the time, the houses of Seattle were not made out of bricks and mortar as they are today, but wood. As a result, and some would say rather predictably, the great fire of 1889 wiped out most of the downtown area - a local cabinet maker had accidentally set fire to a pot of glue which, being resistant to water, refused to go out. The fire department became so worried by the spreading blaze that they brought in hoses from all over town and consequently ran the city out of water before the fire was out - not really the most successful response by a fire department in the history of the United States. After the fire had finally burnt itself out and everybody had been given a chance to stand back and survey the damage, it was decided to rebuild as quickly as possible, but replace the old timber frames with brick so that the same thing couldn't happen again. Furthermore, the town governors saw this as an opportunity to raise the level of the streets by constructing a series of pillars and laying the foundations of the new city on top - thereby eliminating a problem which had existed in Seattle since the birth of the city, the constant flooding of low-lying areas due to the city having originally been built on land recovered from the sea. Hence, the old city vanished below the new one, it's streets becoming dusty passageways and it's houses hidden underground rooms. Reinforcing walls were built along the sides of the old city streets, and concrete poured down the middle, reinforcing the new roads above. The Pavements (Sidewalks if you're American) on each side of the old streets became narrow corridors in front of the buildings and were eventually paved over as new homes and businesses were built above. Small square panes of tinted glass were built into the new pavements, casting eerie shafts of light down onto the darkened streets below, and businesses continued doing business both above and below ground for some time. What had previously been the ground floor of shops and homes became the basement, and some merchants moved their business to the new street level while some continued trading below ground to a slightly seedier side of society. The Seattle underground became home to rampant prostitution, opium and gambling dens, shelters for the homeless and, during prohibition, speak-easies where the thirsty could obtain illegal alcohol.

In 1907, the government considered the problem of rats overrunning the old streets and took the decision to condemn the Seattle underground out of fear that there might be a new outbreak of the Plague - demanding that businesses brick up their basements. The old city, untended and forgotten, fell into disrepair and became a place of mystery. Of course, because the new buildings were built on top of the old, some of the older establishments downtown actually have direct access to the old city through a hole in the wall that some enterprising tour guide has knocked in his basement. As a kid, watching some of the classic old Hammer Horror movies in which people always seemed to have secret doorways in their castle which opened when they pulled a particular book on a nearby bookcase, I used to dream of finding a secret passageway under the stairs that led to a whole new world to explore. It seems incredible to me that this actually happens in Seattle - if it weren't for the fact that doing so might seriously undermine the integrity of the new buildings on top, I'm sure more people would be taking a mallet to their basement walls in the hope of finding a secret world next door. Only a small portion of the old city has been maintained in modern times and is considered safe to be used for tours - the rest has fallen into disrepair and is only used for storage or access to services. One of the most amazing things about the Seattle underground, for me, is that it took so long for it to occur to anyone that people might be interested in it - it wasn't until nearly the seventies that a local entrepreneur by the name of Bill Speidel thought of the idea of taking people down by lantern into the few remaining safe parts of the underground, peppering his tours with a mixture of fact and fiction to keep it interesting. Well, naturally, people turned up in their droves and the Seattle underground tour became a must-see part of Seattle tourism.

The tours, though, are often full and only run on selected days - but with a bit of planning you can come away from Seattle able to boast that you've wandered the streets of an underground ghost town - and how many people can say that?

On my last day in Seattle, I took the Monorail from the downtown area, where the terminus is hidden carefully inside a massive shopping mall which I spent most of the morning getting lost in, to somewhere called The Seattle Centre. This is a large open park, located in West Seattle, which contains another mall, a fairground and most of the sporting facilities of the city. It is also here that you will find the famous Space Needle, towering above the skyline, which I would've found a much more impressive sight if its base and most of the surrounding gardens hadn't been covered in scaffolding and rather more of a building site than the dominating presence seen looming over the city in the opening titles of the TV show Frasier. Does the universe have some sort of law I don't know about, which states that wherever British people go on holiday there has to be extensive building work going on? Not to be put off, I paid my eight dollar entrance fee and rode to the top in the lift - sorry, elevator - and found that the skydeck was home to two revolving restaurants and a rotating conference facility. If you come here to discuss anything with your employees, it's presumably okay to feel as though you're going around in circles. The observation deck, which surrounds the indoor shopping area and Starbucks Coffee shop, gives a breathtaking panoramic view of Seattle which takes in everything from Puget Sound to Mount Rainier - you can see absolutely everything from up there. Telescopes mounted around the deck allowed me to get an even better view of distant objects as I strolled around the deck - a view which was totally unobstructed as there's nothing between visitors and a rather long drop other than a glass barrier at waist height and a sort of metal fence arrangement with barbed wire at the top which looks as though it would be more at home surrounding a prison. This safety barrier struck me as almost wholly ineffective as any sort of anti-suicide device - It's enough to stop anyone accidentally falling off, but let's face it - if anyone has gone to the trouble of riding to the top of the space needle to jump off, they probably aren't going to be too put off by a waist height glass barrier and metal ropes spaced at twenty inch intervals. In February 2004, in fact, somebody actually did climb over the railings and threaten to jump - the police were called, and after negotiating for nearly three hours they managed to talk him out of the idea. Perhaps this is a good indication of just what a nice place Seattle is to stay alive in - in Europe, some cities have been known to have to take extreme measures to stop people launching themselves out of the windows of high buildings, such as physically sealing them up.

At 560 Feet, the Space Needle is certainly not the tallest building I've ever been to by a long way - not even in the states - but during the summer it still manages to pull the tourists in their droves. Of course, my excellent sense of timing being what it is, I've arrived in the spring, and only the actual tower itself remains open - the fun fair and gardens below are tightly shut up for at least the next couple of months. Still, I came away with a souvenir - a ten-pence piece sized doodad inscribed with my name and the date on one side and a picture of the Space needle on the other, from a machine at the top that charged me fifty cents. I grant you, I'm not altogether sure what I'm going to do with a ten-pence piece sized doodad inscribed with all that stuff, but I'm sure I'll find something.

Okay, well before I sign off this evening I think I should just bring up the subject of the Seattle Monorail one last time. As I said earlier, it's not very often that I come across a city with an elevated train system, the only other one I've been to recently being Bangkok in Thailand, but I have to confess to being unable to think of any real purpose for the Seattle monorail, other than just to say they have one. Don't get me wrong - it's a fantastic feat of engineering, and I have ridden it several times while I've been here just for the sheer hell of it, but it really doesn't seem to serve any purpose at all. When I was told that the city had a monorail system, I had reasonably expected to find an extensive network of rails down the middle of all the streets connecting the outlying suburbs with the downtown area - in other words, I had expected to find an ordinary train system, with hundreds of stops, only raised up on a rail. In reality, the Seattle monorail only runs for a total distance of one mile, and doesn't have any stops apart from the terminals at each end. In other words, it is totally useless unless you are either going to the Space Needle or the Westlake shopping centre. On an average day, I can't imagine that many local people either want to go to the Space Needle or to go to the Westlake Centre from the Space Needle - and if you start out from anywhere else, you probably have to walk further to get to the monorail than the distance you will end up riding it for. The journey from one end of the track to the other only takes two minutes, and yet somehow Seattleites don't see anything remotely strange in boasting that it is the fastest Monorail in the country with a top speed of 50mph - a speed which it could never possibly achieve without being launched into orbit from one end of the track. The monorail has even been declared as a historical landmark - something which many fascinating old buildings in the city have yet to achieve. I'll just say it again, what the hell is the point of the Seattle monorail? I know that Americans don't like to walk far, but even the most unfit person could walk the length of the track in minutes - and considering the whole project set the city back a staggering 3.5 million dollars to build, I really do find it hard to imagine a more monumental waste of public money. Okay, so some people might point out that it was built for the World's Fair in Seattle in 1962 and as such was created as more of a "hey, look at this - isn't Seattle a modern city" type of thing than to actually provide functionality, but all the same - 3.5 million dollars. How many starving children in Africa could you feed with that much money? Probably more than the amount that ride the monorail, I would guess. Couldn't they have at least extended it to the suburbs by now, to provide at least a basic level of public service to and from the city?

Still, at least the monorail must be a safe and secure form of transportation, right? After all, the engineers only need to look after a single mile of track. There haven't been any accidents on the Seattle monorail, surely? What could possibly go wrong? Well, where do I start? In 1971, the brakes on one of the trains failed and it ploughed into the buffers at the end of the track, putting several people in hospital and leading me to wonder about the intelligence of building a high speed rail system up in the air at all. Luckily, with only a mile long track, the Seattle monorail was never going to be able to get up the sort of speed needed to cause a real catastrophe, but what exactly would happen if a monorail with a much longer track lost its breaking system at a higher speed and the buffers weren't enough to stop it? If it was an ordinary train, it would come to a quick stop against a wall, but surely a monorail would simply plunge off the end of the rail and fall on top of whoever happened to be walking past at the time? Still, I'm sure they've thought of these things. But then again, nobody had thought of the possibility that a fire might break out on board and passengers would find themselves stranded up in the air with no obvious escape route, but that's exactly what happened in 2004 - and yet, even now, the only route to safety for anyone involved in any sort of monorail accident is via ladders which somebody has to put up against the track. The worst accident to date was in 2005, when somebody who obviously thought they were being clever decided to move the two tracks closer together as they came into the central station so that there would be room to extend the shopping centre. I'm not altogether sure whether they then went home and simply forgot to tell the drivers, or whether somebody just wasn't paying attention at an important moment, but only a short time after reopening, the monorail had to be closed again because two trains tried to pass each other on the narrow stretch of track and had a pretty good go at peeling each other open like cans.

Okay, so it's now 8.30 in the evening and about time I got down off my soapbox and made some phone calls so that I can get to Canada in the morning. Rain is still battering the windows, and the sky is alight with flashes of lightning. On the news, houses in the outlying suburbs continue to fly apart at an alarming rate. I think I'll spend most of tonight with the sheets wrapped around me, watching repeats of Cheers on the Telly...

About Simon and Burfords Travels:

Simon Burford is a UK based travel writer. He will be re-publishing his travel blogs, chapters from his books and other miscellaneous rantings on these pages over the coming weeks and months, and the entry on this page may not necessarily reflect todays date.