Portland
I've been mostly hanging out in the lounge car on Amtrak trains, especially this one that has window that wrap halfway along the ceilings. This one's stalled at Salem, though. All the other trains I've been on have run reasonably on time, but this one's only gone about 100km and we've already had three several-minute delays.
This time, I was in Portland just for the weekend, but I was here for longer a couple of weeks ago. That time I stayed at a hostel, and it turned out to be one of the best I'd stayed in anywhere in the world. I shared a six-bed mixed-gender dorm room with some really friendly and interesting people.
It took me a while to warm up to the one that I ended up spending the most time with. Yes, she was very attractive, but she seemed a little mainstream for my tastes. But then I noticed a couple of little things that suggested she was at least a little more environmentally conscious than I would expect from a Houston 30-year-old who wears makeup just to hang out in the afternoon. Sure enough, she works for Texas' environmental authority and regularly reads the riot act to big oil companies-they apparently don't like being told 'no'. She's also poly-friendly, but that's not all that surprising since she lived in Austin for a few years. We ran around looking for tickets to a concert she wanted to go to, and as a fallback, a concert we both liked (Frank Black!). We didn't succeed, but it was great to hang out with her.
It was also great hanging out with Jessie and her partner, who were visiting from Connecticut. I met her online while she was planning to visit Sydney; we missed out on seeing each other then and at least once in the meantime, but we spent a whole day together in Portland. We had breakfast and lunch at the Blossoming Lotus in the Pearl district; it's a raw food restaurant which also hosts yoga classes and other health-oriented events. We also wandered around town, spotting fountains, parks, and fish flung through buildings. And a lot of electric cars-I've seen more of those in Portland than anywhere else. Same goes for pregnant women, actually.
Another person I really enjoyed spending time with was Ivy, a friend of science_vixen's. She brought me to the most awesome cafés, bars and restaurants in Portland, like the Pied Cow, Pambiché and Deschutes Brewery. She was also my escort in Powell's Books, not just in the city, but also a smaller, suburban one. The 'smaller' one was still bigger than most bookshops I've seen, and I managed to get most of the books hopeforyou asked me to get. She also showed me a colourful neighbourhood that featured, in the middle of a nature strip, a community notice board with the Fibonacci Sequence, for no apparent reason. And nice kitties.
One night I got together with the_xtina, who I dated 10 years ago. We clicked well enough for me to decide to stay with her again on my way back down, which is what I did over the weekend just passed. She lives in a house with excellently-maintained 1950s furniture and fixtures; it felt like a time warp to visit her. We mostly geeked out together, me tweaking a Python script I've written for dealing with photos and tags and flickr, and her making the Poly-Friendly Professionals List a little more automated. We also went out to dinner with one of her current partners last night, had a few beers, and met dogs. It was a warm, pleasantly sultry evening, a perfect note to end my stay on, especially after the cooler climates of Washington and BC.
This morning I rode my bike around. Portland is the best city I've seen in North America for cycling-there are a tonne of bike lanes and paths, and the signage is excellent. After some general random riding around, I decided to find the StJohn's bridge, which I'd seen in a big photo at a market. It's beautiful and elegant, and the park underneath was a great place to sit for an hour and ponder life as the river went past. It also had a sculpture to mark where the mills used to be-by looking through the lens, you had a live view of the other side of the bank with photos of the mills superimposed-brilliant! But pondering life was one of the main purposes of this trip, so I did rather a lot of that, and even wrote in my paper journal.
Anyhow, until recently, Portland didn't excite me at all-I always compared it to Adelaide. There are vague similarities in the architecture, but I saw a side of Portland in the last few weeks that I haven't seen before. I suppose that's not surprising; the first time I was here was with my emotionally abusive ex, visiting her family in a rather plain part of town. The only other time was when I was here for a concert, and I ended up hanging out with homeless street kids whom I'd met-they gave me an enlightening tour, but of course their view of Portland would've been marred a bit. But this time I saw fabulous venues, intriguing counterculture, and met wonderful people. It's still not on my top ten list of things to do in the U.S, but I'll definitely come this way again.