We need more cities like Portland. This almost neighbour:
• Calls its seniors “honoured citizens.”
• Posts signs like the following in the windows of various businesses, especially restaurants: “[Name of establishment] welcomes ALL races, genders, nationalities, religions and sexual orientations. You are safe here. We stand with you.”
• Takes pride in “Portland weird” – like its fascination with extreme donut concoctions: at least two of the Voodoo Donut shops are open 24 hours featuring creations like bacon maple bar (raised yeast doughnut with maple icing and bacon on top) and voodoo doll (raised yeast donut filled with raspberry jelly topped with chocolate icing and a pretzel stake).
More extremes:
Powell’s square block City of Books, the largest independent bookstore in the world, with about one million new, used and rare books. Mill Ends Park, the Guinness Book record holder for the world’s smallest park, with a diameter of 60cm.
Pick up The Portland Mercury Visitors’ Guide to Portland and you find a double-page centre spread featuring 27 premium and retail cannabis stores and attractions.
Oregon allows anyone 21 and older to buy marijuana from a licensed store, although U.S. federal law prohibits such purchase or use.
So this visitors’ publication, in an article right after Portland’s Ultimate Donuts features The First-Time Pot Buyer’s Guide, which reassures readers they are unlikely to be the focus of the Drug Enforcement Agency or a federal marshal.
That’s just another “welcome to Portland,” which I found to be such a visitor-friendly city (pop. 584,000).
Standing on a downtown street looking at a map to figure out where you are? Within 15 seconds somebody came up to me to ask if I needed help.
And if ever there was a place to take the time to smell the roses, it would have to be at TripAdvisor’s number one Portland attraction, the International Rose Test Garden in 159-acre Washington Park. Portland is often called the City of Roses.
You can easily spend a couple of hours here, admiring the colours, shapes and sizes, smelling the more than 600 varieties in the 10,000 bushes in the park.
You might even run across a couple in the middle of proposing, or a young woman playing violin among the roses.
By now you might be rather hungry. Some 600 permanently parked street food trucks cluster in various pods around the city, with most items selling in the $6 to $9 range. The trucks are regularly ranked by various reviewers and even have a newsy blog at www.foodcartsportland.com.
Equally visible are the estimated 2,000 homeless people doing it rough on the downtown streets, an issue shared by so many cities.
Whether it was a common practice or not, I did notice people giving cash to many of the homeless, even when a donation wasn’t solicited. Perhaps this was simply another aspect of Portland’s friendly city image.
For more information, see www.travelportland.com.
Mike Grenby teaches travel writing at Bond University on Australia’s Gold Coast: [email protected]
