Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Bread and Roses

After saving up a year's worth of vacation (and home improvement injuries to body and soul), I have finally taken a real vacation - three whole weeks off! (You'll never see an American strike over having to work a few extra years, good little drones that we are!) This long absence is in part why there has been no news on the home front; in solidarity with the French, who I can't help but love for being one of the last populations willing to hold its entire society hostage to fight for a culture of leisure, and also with the perhaps more noble and certainly more justified textile workers of the 1900s whose protests are immortalized in poem and my Bryn Mawr class song, I have gone on strike. My life shall not be sweated from birth until life closes - give me bread, but give me roses!!

And so, even though I've been home a month now, I'm still (mostly) on home improvement strike and instead of amusing you with my latest construction calamity, I am taking you, fair reader(s?), on a tour of my new favorite U.S. city - Portland, Oregon - also known as The City of Roses, and home to amazing food, excellent beer, stellar design, sustainable living, and, most importantly, the company of near and dear friends. There is also, apparently, a stubborn libertarian nudist streak (we saw bumper stickers lauding the joys of naked hiking, jogging, and biking in our few days there), which only adds to its charm from a visitor's perspective. In short, despite the weather, I would put Portland ahead of even New Orleans as what America can be when we take the best of what the world has come up with and make it uniquely ours.

In many respects, Portland shares a similar feel to DC - it is based on the confluence of the Willamette (Will-AH-mette, by the way) and Columbia Rivers, upstream of the Pacific Ocean by a couple of hours. Portland proper has about 500,000 residents, but the greater area is about 2.2 million people, which is a lot bigger than I had thought. The city itself is superbly planned, with incredible public transit (free to all in the main 3-mile downtown area, and each rail car and bus equipped with bike hooks/racks) and bike lanes everywhere (I give the Portlanders extra kudos for biking in all that rain). There is not only recycling but also city-wide composting. Portland is the U.S.' most sustainable city and one of the top 10 in the world (some say #1, some say #2, but to be totally fair, I think Freiburg, Germany has been wrongly dismissed in the lists - not only can you basically not have a car in certain neighborhoods, but not even Portland has laws limiting how much heat can leak from your house). Green space abounds throughout the city, with Forest Park, the largest wilderness city park in the U.S., covering 5,000 acres, and the lovely Washington Park, perched on a hill overlooking the city and home to the International Rose Test Garden. Apparently all that rain makes for good rose growing. I agree:

Can't you just smell these? White roses have been my lifelong favorite, although after seeing the beauty and smelling the most perfectly delicate perfume - an almost half rose/half lavender scent - of the pale purply-pink ones below, I think there is at least a tie. There were so many unique and interesting specimens, it was hard to pick a favorite.

In addition to the amazing Test Garden, there is also the most lovely Chinese garden I have ever come across, the Lan Su Chinese Garden right in the middle of downtown. I am a huge fan of Japanese gardens and had never really seen a formal Chinese garden, but there are lots of similarities:


In general, P-town has a pretty funky artsy industrial feel to the place, and they've done a lot to revive old warehouses. Everywhere you go, there seems to be either cool art and/or great design.


Portland also has an incredible music scene whose sound seems to match the weather. If i'd included a soundtrack to this post, it would feature The Shins, The Decemberists, Blitzen Trapper, and my very beloved M. Ward. Also, keep your eyes open for the debut of Aquavit! Our friend's band practice space is perhaps the coolest one ever, housed in a former industrial warehouse and complete with center stage free for any of the bands to use for concerts, and guitar strings in the vending machine:

Then there's the food and the beer. Portland has nearly 30 microbreweries, the best pinot noir in the country, and generally has fabulous food everywhere. Best of all were the prices, which were usually the equivalent of taco night in Alexandria, no matter how nice the place. (This might have something to do with Portland's 25% unemployment rate.) The city also has a burgeoning foodcart scene, complete with every kind of food you can think of, even if it wasn't one you thought of actually eating:



But the pies at this place looked pretty awesome:

They even best DC with having one of a handful of US Teuscher chocolate boutiques (one of my desert island foods is a Teuscher champagne truffle)...
But as usual, they were closed at an absurdly early hour (i have a growing collection of photos of closed Teuscher stores). I guess the Swiss keep Bahnhofstrasse operating hours, no matter where in the world they are.

If you're into Asian food & architecture and keep late hours, Biwa is a dream come true. Kobe beef sliders with sake and seaweed salad at 11pm. It's also housed in some sort of architecture school, so even the bathrooms are uber cool.

While technically outside of Portland, I also have to say that the best wood-fired pizza I have ever had was at Solstice Wood Fire Cafe in Bingen, WA. You may not have thought blackberries, mascarpone, and prosciutto belonged on pizza, but you would be oh so very wrong.

There was also quite the taco scene, much to the delight of my spouse, who is planning to apply for the Head Lab Researcher/Taste Tester position here. If he gets it, I expect we'll become a bi-coastal couple:


And then, there is Broder, home to the best bloody mary on the planet, made with fine Danish aquavit and homemade pickled vegetables instead of a celery stick. I asked for the recipe, but given their total silence, I'd say it's a trade secret.

Although perhaps my favorite meal of all was the lovely breakfast our friends made for us at their beautiful bungalow apartment in Irvington, complete with home-grown tomatoes:

As well as being a great city, Portland is surrounded by natural beauty, including the Columbia Gorge, where the two rivers cleave the Cascade mountains into a swath of cliffs and waterfalls, and which was one of the last stops for Lewis and Clark in their nearly 3 year ordeal/exploration of the United States. Multnomah Falls, the most famous of the string of waterfalls along the Gorge, is the second highest in the U.S. at 620'.



Bridal Veil Falls is another really famous fall in the Gorge:

But the clear favorite was Latourelle Falls, whose scale and colors defy explanation.


What is amazing is the scale - here is a shot with the guys waving from behind the falls (the two red dots):


After I returned to work, I was walking down a hall in a distant part of the building, and passed a framed poster for National Public Lands Day that has probably hung on the wall since the 1990s, and suddenly realized that it was almost this very shot.

Sadly, four days in Portland just isn't nearly enough time to take it all in. As it is, we missed Pine State Biscuits by 30 minutes. But that's okay; aside from the best reason to visit (two of our favorite people on the planet), it's always good to save something for the next time.

(Stay tuned for Part 2 of our Western Exploration, where we hit the San Juan Islands, the Olympic National Park, and Whistler, Canada. As soon as I sort through the 700 photos, I'll get a few up on the blog.)

1 comment:

Timothy said...

You certainly live in an awesome place! Gorgeous photos.