Portland is a pretty cool city, and as much as my friends and native PDX residents Aaron and Chris would hate me to say this, but Portlandia is a fairly accurate parody. Let me preface that when I was waiting to board my plane to Portland, there was literally a guy juggling bowling pins in the middle of the crowded gate, and when I was eating some food adjacent to the gate, I was standing next to a 6.5-foot man wearing a bicycle helmet with his jumpsuit’s color scheme matching that of a hippy clown.
Caricatures aside, I loved Portland. I met up with my old grad school classmate/fellow New Yorker Brett Burton, and stayed with my old undergrad classmate Aaron Colter. I hiked up Mount Tabor, had some of the best food cart food ever to be digested in my gullet, and I went to a strip club that far surpasses any strip club here in Brooklyn (they fucking serve barbecue in Portland’s clubs). What really amazed me is that Portland has no sales tax whatsoever, and I almost spit out my cold brew coffee once Aaron told me this. As a result of this revelation, I managed to buy some random stuff at their thrift stores, some Polaroid film and accessories, and a ton of cigarettes — all with complete reckless abandon.
Overall, when (and really, it’s a matter of “when”) I move out of New York, I’ll definitely move to the West Coast, and I do have my eyes towards Portland (Los Angeles and San Francisco, I’m also looking at you). It’s another one of those cities I wanted to visit before I die, and after experiencing it for a very long weekend, it’s everything I could ask for to live a life free of stress, pretentiousness, or near-bankruptcy.
And now for the photos:
