This is going to be a quick update just to introduce a new adventure: I am visiting the Pacific Northwest!
After having paid a very quick visit to Portland and Seattle a few years ago as part of a longer trip (which you can read about on this very blog), I was left wishing I’d spent more time getting to know the cities and the region, so this time I’m coming back to see only those two cities plus Vancouver, Canada, which is going to be a first for me!
I left Barcelona to meet up with my mom in Amsterdam, where we spent the night in a criminally overpriced in-terminal hotel (the advantage is that you don’t have to leave security, so it’s convenient for morning flights) before catching our Amsterdam-Portland flight.
Trouble began once in Portland, though, because the airline lost my mom’s bag -again, just like when we went to Tokyo! So of course that means lining up to schedule a delivery and then worrying we may have to spend all morning tomorrow holed up in our apartment waiting for the delivery! Also not ideal: we had like two hours to kill before we could check into our apartment. At least I got to see the renovated Portland airport, now covered in a beautiful canopy of wooden lattice work! Their notorious green carpet is still present in some locations, in case you were wondering.
The trip is off to a rocky start -we’ll see how much this derails our itinerary for tomorrow- but things got better once we got to our apartment, dropped our bags (…bag) and took a bus to a big grocery store to stock up. Already on this short trip we saw various urban tribes: a man wearing Hawaiian shorts and a top hat, or a goth girl at the bus, and everything inbetween. Plus everyone is disarmingly nice, perpetually a shock to someone from the more reserved parts of Europe like me. Random people said hello to me on the street, big smiles whenever people bumped into each other, and I was especially charmed by the bus driver who gave us a big goofy grin and a theatrical thumbs up when we finally figured out how to pay the fare with our cards.
Plus, buying groceries in a foreign country is always fun in and of itself: I love discovering what types of food the country in question has a million different types of, or the odd Spanish exports that find their way onto the shelves.
On the way back we got to walk a little through a residential neighborhood, so we also got to take a look at all the different houses, each their own color, each with their own landscaping style for their lawns,
So that’s all I’ve got for you today, a rather inauspicious landing. I will report back tomorrow!
This Is A Lake 