"Come to Seattle next time, it's much better"

This weekend two of my cousins living in Seattle drove down to Portland.

We had brunch at Broder, this Scandinavian-influenced place and I think we waited 1 hour for a table, one hour for service and then a half hour to eat. Yum?

We went through confusing pathways in my cousin's SUV Jeep to find the Saturday Market, wandered around there for a bit, walked to Voodoo Donuts and decided that the line was too long for donuts, then went to Washington Park where the Japanese Garden and Rose Garden are situated.

My cousin (the one who just came back from Hong Kong and not the one with the SUV) caught 75 Pokemon in Pokemon Go that day.

Then we went to Pok Pok where the wait for a table was 2-21/2 hours!! We had takeout instead. It was decent food, but not worth the wait!!

I then had horrible sleep at an AirBnB place and in the morning we set out for the Multnomah Falls hike. There was a really cool view at Vista House which reminded me of Yangshuo in China.

When we got to hiking, I felt bad because they are both regular runners/hikers (I had warned them of this beforehand) and felt that I kept on slowing them down. I think my last more than one-hour hike and up more than 500 ft was back near Charlevoix during the summer of 2009! I mean, I like hiking, but I like to go at my own pace, which is called "Very Slow" for most other people, and I usually go hiking in groups, so I actually hate hiking because I always feel both rushed and guilty at the same time. Anyway, after many waterfalls we got a quick bite to eat (at McDonald's in Troutdale) and after many annoying roads, they dropped me off and rushed back to Seattle. Before getting back into the car, they said, "Come to Seattle next time, it's much better. We're Seattle snobs now."

Well, I guess it's because of the roads, and I guess Portland isn't that special, but I think it's not too bad. Except for the lines.

I am now here at a reconverted factory/hotel in downtown Old Chinatown. It's really weird because I'm the only Chinese person here in this white-owned hotel yet they are advertising aspects of Chinatowns. I am sitting on a rooftop patio typing this.

RIP City, the place of lines

Everywhere you go is a lineup here in Portland. You line up for brunch, for donuts, for the bookstore at Powell's, for dinner, just about everywhere.

There are street signs that say "This neighborhood is within 1000 feet of a school" and many streets are one-way streets that split off into two or three directions after a certain intersection that takes you through many a winding road.

The hard rain here is more like a misty drizzle and there are dogs and dog owners everywhere.

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Now, for some things:
a) There is gentrification in which the downtown is increasingly owned by whiter/richer people moving in and people of colour and poor people being pushed out to the suburbs
b) The hip zones of Mississippi and Alberta used to be populated by black people and artists until the city kicked them out and set up their own brand of ultra-cool
c) There are probably more Asian-styled restaurants and stores with Totoro paraphenila owned and operated by white people than anywhere else (while in Phuket I heard that there are more burger joints than anything else)
d) There were sundown laws excluding non-white people for the longest time
e) There's this article and Kamau Bell's expose/interview with Portlanders.

blog PDX

Downtown Portland is a nondescript city with an abysmal traffic at rush hour (single lanes out of the city, anyone?).

Its square parks remind me of Montreal or Quebec City and its fairly dense, low high-rises remind me of San Francisco.

Powell's books is fairly non-descript, but large. It is what World's Biggest Bookstore would've been. It also has a lot of independent cinemas for the population it holds.

One thing it has going for it is its tri-transport system of streetcars, buses and light rail. BUT I first went downtown the second day that the city had installed bike rentals all over. The program had been a long time coming because city didn't want taxpayer money to fund it, and they were waiting for a funder. Then Nike did.

I think I've seen this before in books

This is a North American city that can still hawk items on the sidewalk, not fake Louis Vuittons like they do in New York, but homemade things. I've walked by children on the sidewalks of the busiest street selling lemonade and men dressed in suits buying from them. I've walked past people selling jars of jam, and rode past a family sitting on their porch yelling, "75 cents for a bike wash!" People don't have to wait for official sidewalk sale days here, nor do they have to open a store. This kind of thing died in the suburbs long ago (because no one is on the streets there! ha!), and in the cities people are too suspicious of each other to stop.

I think I've read about this kind of selling in books, but I don't recall seeing it so frequently. This place is so foreign to me, this place called community.

Surrounded by Farms

So, I inevitably landed in a place that has one of the most active community garden communities in Canada, a place where a university has its own gardens, and a place that is surrounded by farmland and where I know a bunch of people who work in farming or has farms and goes out on the weekends to farm. I didn't know that Trent University has such large environmental science and food systems programs, like Guelph does. I almost feel like I owe it to my roots to be interested in food growth, what with my mother having studied nutrition and my dad studying microbiology in Nebraska, of all places.

I am such an cold-climate urbanist that I must say this: I like the idea of gardening. I just don't worms nor insects. Yes, I am depending on others for my livelihood, but I just can't get over the idea of insects and things that pop out at you. Would this be the place to get over this fear? I don't know...I've always wanted to go WWOOFing, again, the idea of it is incredible...but would I ever do it?

So...will Peterborough make me into the permaculture enthusiast I've always been in my dreams? Or will I keep on going to farmer's markets as an urbanist crazy for farm-to-table restaurants?