Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Portland Obeservations, 1 week +/-

As many of you know, Kindling is now based in Portland. If you didn't know, now you do. Those of you in DC who feel, I don't know, jilted, enraged, sad and incurably depressed about our departure from the nation's capital, know this: we're sorry, but it had to happen, and if you're ever in Portland, look us up. Come hang out.

Anyway. Portland. There's an image of Portland, enhanced by certain television shows like, say, Portlandia, of eco-conscious, slightly passively aggressive, intellectual types who care about things like eating only locally sourced food and drinking only pour-over coffee, or else grungy hipsters with weird piercings and tattoos that possibly play guitar or bass for a band that sounds like, is inspired by, but is in no way derivative of Pearl Jam or Nirvana, or else general freaks. And then there's the rain. We were asked several times before we moved if the rain would bother us, if it would make us so miserable and depressed that we start memorizing the bus schedule for the purposes of jumping in front of a good one when the depression finally got to be too much.

Here are some observations based on our first week here -- note: we've only been here a week and have explored a very, very small slice of the city. One, there are plenty of normal people here, too. In fact, everybody is pretty normal. I mean, yeah, there's a certain element of people that try to be weird. The mural that says Keep Portland Weird. And yeah, we haven't seen the whole city yet, so maybe our sample size is a bit off. Whatever. The people here are great. And friendly.

(One thing I've noticed, is that people smoke cigarettes here about the same rate as people in DC. People in DC smoke a lot, but it's always -- with the exception of service workers and the homeless -- in a happy, self-conscious, look-at-me-I'm-in-a-cigarette-ad kind of way. People here smoke with a cloud of tragedy around them. A sort of I'm-smoking-because-life-sucks-and-the-slow-willing-pollution-of-my-lungs-is-a-reflection-of-this. I don't know the reason for this, like I said, it's just an observation).

Two: the rain. I'll hold off judgement on the rain. I mean, it has rained since we've been here. It has been grey a majority of the days we've been here, and doesn't seem so bad. I'm imagining it to be akin to Phoenix's heat. i.e. it isn't the fact that it's 110 degrees, it's the fact that it's 110 degrees for six months straight. It aggregates. So, it may well suck a ton after months and months of wet, grey skies. But for now, it's cool. It makes everything lush and green.

Three: there's Thai food everywhere. There may be more Thai restaurants per capita than Thailand, keeping in mind that I'm counting all restaurants in Thailand as technically Thai because they're in Thailand. One in Portland will not want for Pad Thai, like ever. However, I cannot vouch for the quality of all this Thai food, even though the ones I've tried have been pretty good. Which reminds me, also, there's food trucks everywhere, which is really cool.

Four: Powells. Any lover of books should make a pilgrimage.

That's it for the observations for now, really, unless I wanted to get redundant, which I don't. This, these observations and generalizations, will probably all be turned on their heads after a month, or two months. But we really like it.

Now a bit of business. May 1. The first issue of Kindling in Kindling's new home. Yes, Kindling still exists. Mark your calendars.




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