portland: subtly hip

portland (in oregon) is near the west coast of the usa between san francisco and seattle. i must confess that i hadn't really heard of this beautiful place until i started researching this trip but as soon as i started looking into it, it just kept sounding better and better so i knew it would be a great stop for us. it's a small city, much smaller than san francisco or los angeles where we have been previously in the US, and i believe they have a population of around 600,000. portland is known for its microbreweries, coffee, food carts, roses and the unofficial city slogan of  "keep portland weird" which you see on car bumper stickers.

we popped into the visitor information centre the first morning we were here where a very helpful volunteer piled us high with leaflets and suggestions. when we questioned her about the weather for the day (portland rains a lot), she replied with a wry smile, "i was born on the oregon coast... if it rains you'll just get wet", which, from what i gather, pretty much sums up most portlander attitudes to the rain. she also gave us a map of all the public art in the city, apparently all funded by local transport companies, which we spent some time hunting out. here is a small selection, the total must run into hundreds.

one of portland's biggest attractions for us has always been powell's city of books. the bookshop claims to be the largest independent book shop in the world. it is crazy huge and just amazing. we've been twice so far (and i'm sure we'll go again!) and spent hours in there just browsing the books and sitting reading in the coffee shop. it's a book lover's heaven - we haven't found one title we were looking for to not be on the shelf.

we took advantage of the fact that they both buy and sell books by both buying and selling. we sold four books that we had both read and bought four books that we hadn't read! so we weren't too out of pocket but we do have to lose 3kg each before we fly home so we might have to read them all in the next month! we also nipped into the amazing clothes exchange shop, where i could have easily spent a whole day, and bought a funky second hand daisy necklace at a bargain price.

top on jamie's list of portland things to do was to visit ground kontrol, a games arcade specialising in vintage games. here is jam's round-up of his number one attraction:

the ground kontrol arcade is a nostalgic geek's dream. although there are neon signs around the outside, the inside is very dim and relies heavily on the glow of a hundred classic arcade games and pinball machines to light the slightly dingy area. the first thing you encounter is a machine to convert your dollar bills to quarters, which every machine takes. playing with quarters is a rewarding experience, and not just in a wistfully sentimental way; in essence it means the better you are, the cheaper it is to play. experts could conceivably play for an hour or two for under a dollar, others (i.e. me) might be out of practice and require approximately 7 dollars. but it was worth every cent to play some of the classic games from the late 1970s and early 80s that i've never had a chance to play in their original joystick glory. during our time there i managed to play frogger, house of the dead, tron, q*bert, teenage mutant ninja turtles, gauntlet: dark legacy, and my personal favourite: asteroids. even a trip to the restroom was entertaining, with pacman and ms. pacman (of course!) indicating the respective gendered doors, pacman pellets painted on the floor leading the way to the urinal, and bright flashing lights around the sink. genius.

we also paid a visit to the locally acclaimed 'voodoo donuts' of portland who are known for the range of weird and wonderful doughnuts sold 24 hours a day in their shop. the photo below demonstrates our purchases but in the range of doughnuts available i even saw one with streaks of bacon on top (brad pitt's favourite according to our guide book)! 

the kennedy school is not, as it might sound, a school. it used to be but now it is a hotel, restaurant and bar complex. keeping the school theme, the classroom's original names have been kept above the doors but they have been replaced by bars, hotel rooms and the old cafeteria is now the large, family friendly, courtyard restaurant. we went into three of the four bars: the boiler room, the cypress room, and the honours bar. the only room we didn't venture into was detention as they were smoking cigars in there and we didn't fancy the second-hand smoke. they also have a brewery on-site and i can certainly recommended their ruby ale. walking the corridors between the various rooms certainly allowed us to imagine the building in its previous incarnation.

two things that i forgot to mention so far: there is a radio station dedicated entirely to pearl jam here (= very happy jamie) and everywhere seems to sell something they describe as 'mexican coke'. we weren't sure what mexican coke was so we asked and on enquiry we were informed that the mexican version is still made with cane sugar whereas regular coke is now made with corn syrup in the USA. therefore mexican coke is more desirable. jamie's curiosity was piqued, so he indulged but said he couldn't tell the difference between it and regular coke except that it was a tiny bit less sweeter than usual.