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Sarah, Jesse, and I rode the 7:30 am Amtrak to Portland together. At PDX, JPM went his own way to install a sound sculpture at a college 40 miles away; Sarah and I walked to the Ace Hotel, marvelling at how flat Portland is. That's not all there is to it, but flat is nice and it really brings out the bikes. It helped that it was warm and sunny, too. People slept on blankets in the park we walked through. We got the impression the police don't hassle the homeless as much as they do in Seattle. People seemed a lot more easygoing in general. After drifting through a few galleries we took a fat 2.5 hour nap. They have phones in hotel rooms so we got in touch with Jesse and his hosts and agreed to rendezvous at the Doug Fir Lounge, a stylishly converted Howard Johnson's where Giant Sand would be headlining in the downstairs venue (which had to be the swankest rock club I've ever seen--it was carpeted, for Christ's sake). On the walk over the Burnside Bridge, a kid on skateboard paused to photograph the river with a spendy SLR. It seemed a lot of people had fancy cameras everywhere we went. I know it's ridiculous to say this, but other than the bikes and river, Portland didn't strike me as overly photogenic. But I liked it. |