I changed jobs just over a year ago and an awesome part of my new Employer’s approach to staff development is that they send members of the team to conferences and training.

I had the privilege of attending a boot camp for cloud architects in Bellevue, run by Microsoft for their Partners and also had a day in between travelling from Scotland to Seattle to have a look at the city with my colleagues.

We basically got lost after visiting Pike Place Market, we thought we were heading towards lake Union but hadn’t read the map quite correctly. So we looked around and spotted the Space Needle fairly nearby (it’s a bit of a spottable land mark) and headed towards that.

The majority view was that we didn’t want to spend the money on going up the Space Needle so we went next door in to MoPOP Museum of Pop Culture. As I discovered this has a fairly significant connection to Microsoft as I saw one exhibit after another from the Paul G. Allen collection and it slowly dawned that a founder of the museum was also co-founder of Microsoft.

This place is amazing; it starts with the swoopy architecture which has a monorail bursting through it. Then the inside is all modern clean lines with doors and stairs leading to themed exhibits.

There are closed off exhibitions behind doors that cover elements like films or people or open areas that open out to the full height of the museum.

Well worth a visit.