Adventures in Portlandia!
At first glance, Portland is the greatest place on earth. Upon exploration, Portland is still the greatest place on earth. You know how ever major metropolitan area has it's totally awesome areas and it's totally crappy areas? Well Portland is all totally awesome areas. Even the areas described as 'sketchy' are rundown in a cool way.
We drove through an area known for it's homeless population, and it was still an active, artsy, and historic area. The rundown buildings really just looked historic, the graffiti was artistic, and there were active businesses all over. It's not that I think an area needs to be deemed crappy if it's inhabited by homeless folks, because I don't feel that way. However, it's pretty clear that lots of other folks view things that way because they more or less sprint away from areas with either homeless people or black people. White Flight is as prevalent as ever.
Please excuse my social work-y rant, but I really can't help myself.
That is, however, another aspect of Portland I should probably mention. There are no black people. Now that doesn't necessarily mean it completely lacks in diversity. According to Wikipedia (take it as you will): "Portland has one of the largest Vietnamese populations in America per capita, as well as the 7th highest LGBT population in the country, with 8.8% of residents identifying as homosexual, and the metro area ranks 4th in the nation at 6.1%." That is, if you consider LGBT diversity. If you do, they also seems to have a large vegetarian/vegan population, which I can't back up with facts, only with my dining experiences.
I'm really not kidding about the black people, though. We've probably seen all of four black people, and we spent the whole day driving around pretty much every part of the city.
Here's the racial breakdown via Wikipedia citing the 2010 Census...The racial makeup of the city was 73.9% White/72.2% non-Hispanic white(405,938), 9.4% Hispanic or Latino (of any race) (54,840), 7.1% Asian (41,692), 6.3% Black or African American (36,695), 1.0% Native American (5,991), 0.5% Pacific Islander (3,564), and 5.0% from other races (28,987).
Okay, on to our adventures.
Mary Ann provided us with a three page list of cool stuff to do around here. She's also the one who pointed us towards the Umpqua Falls and Hot Springs, which were awesome, so as you can imagine we were pretty excited to get started on her list.
First we climbed up Mount Taber, which is an extinct volcano in the Portland city limits.
Then we visited the Lone Fir Cemetery.
There's a high population of loggers in this cemetery, so there were a lot of headstones like this one.
If strange and terrible things start happening to me, we can pretty much assume posting pictures of graves on the internet is what did it.
Next on the list was the Rose Garden. The roses weren't in bloom, but lots of other pretty flowers were.
Adam picked a pretty one for my hair, which I'm sure is totally against the rules.
Then we visited Central Library, which is a really beautiful old library downtown.
Next we went to 'The Grotto', a beautiful Catholic sanctuary.
Our Sorrowful Mother
The Elevator to the upper gardens.
The meditation room.
The view from the meditation room.
A labyrinth. If you haven't ever walked one of these, I recommend it. Whether or not you're religious, they're peaceful and relaxing.
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The Gardens
We made a quick stop at the Hollywood Theater. It wasn't open, so we couldn't explore it, unfortunately.
We ate out twice, which I should regret more than I do. We got some delicious vegan chorizo tacos and had some of the best sushi I've ever eaten. We ate the sushi too fast for pictures, but here's a taco.
Lastly, we went to the White Eagle, a bar owned by McMenamins. McMenamins is a brewing company that owns bars, historic hotels, venues, and theaters in Portland. We had some locally brewed beer and listened to a folk band.
So far, Portland rocks.
Marissa
