Our first stop for today was one of the highlights of any visit to Portland: Powell’s City of Books, the world’s largest independent bookstore!
I knew from my previous visit that one should plan to spend an entire morning at Powell’s, so we made sure to get there shortly after they opened at 10AM. It was sunny and hot outside (it would later rise to 30°C!), all the more reason to take refuge indoors.
It is impossible to really convey in pictures just how enormous Powell’s is, because it’s spread out over three floors of an entire city block and there’s no one overarching view where you could see the entire collection, but if you haven’t been, just take my word for it: it is bigger than anything you can imagine! It is made up of six or seven different themed sections, and each one is large enough that you’d consider it a well-stocked bookstore on its own.
We had to take a break halfway through at the bookstore’s own cafe for a pick-me-up, after we’d already been browsing for an hour and change. Whenever we thought to look for an author we knew, we found they stocked their entire bibliography: Janet Evanovich and Michael Connelly, for example, occupied three entire shelves each! I got myself a gorgeous hardcover copy of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, probably my favorite sci-fi book, with a beautiful retro design.
This time I also went into the rare book room, a restricted area where they store their most ancient (one book is from the 15th century, from when the print was a recent invention!) and most expensive (one book costs $350,000!) books. The door says you have to request a special pass from the information desk that makes it sound like you will have to go downstairs and fill out a form, but in fact there were a bunch of passes inside a box right next to the entrance and we could just help ourselves. The inside looks like an antique library, glass cabinets included.
There isn’t a lot more that I can say about browsing books, but we still spent almost another hour visiting every section and checking out the staff recommendations before heading to the cashier. I only got the one book; the prices felt way more expensive this time around, even the weathered second-hand copies cost $15. I distinctly remember getting a few bargains last time. Inflation, I guess?
By the time we walked out into the scorching sun it was just one o’clock, a tad too early to eat, too late to do anything, and far too hot to dither outside, so my strategy was to take the bus to get to a recommended restaurant: Xin Ding, a Chinese restaurant near Chinatown specialized in dim sum (which is apparently a specialty of Chinese restaurants in the PNW). I got myself a generous bowl of pork wonton in chili sauce, which were delicious, flavorful but not very spicy. Still, I thought it’s the kind of restaurant that’s best enjoyed between four or five people, so you can order lots of different dumplings and enjoy the variety. Having to choose only one plate gave me FOMO!
From the restaurant it was a short walk to our next destination, the Lan Su Chinese Garden -mercifully, because the midday sun was unbearable, but also because the area was even more depressed than I remembered, not unsafe but certainly unsettling to walk through.
The garden itself was just as delightful as I left it, with its immaculate stone pathways delicately surrounding the pond where more colorful carps swam around. It is a small place, but it’s a serene oasis in the middle of the city that made me feel transported.
There are several pavilions and even a two-storey tea house with a cafe (did not stop to check if this one was as inaccessible as the one at the Japanese Garden!), but the biggest attraction is the bridge and the tiny moon pavilion in the middle of the pond, best enjoyed from the large stone veranda behind the main building.
After leaving the garden, we still had all afternoon ahead of us. Because it might rain tomorrow, I thought this would be a good opportunity to visit Pittock Mansion, an early 20th century manor up on the hills of Washington Park: the view is supposed to be worth the visit, so better to enjoy it while the weather’s clear! Getting there by public transport is possible but takes a long time, so we took an Uber instead.
My guidebooks had made me suspect that the mansion might not really be worth the visit, but I’m happy to report that we had a grand old time. The building itself is beautiful, and the rooms inside are preserved in pristine condition -you could never tell that the heirs of the Pittocks had to sell it off and it was going to be demolished until Portland citizens in the 1960s raised funds to buy it, restore it, and turn it into the house museum it is today.
Unlike other house museums (and you know I like a good house museum) that only show the most dignified rooms, here the kitchens and the bathrooms are also restored, which really impresses the notion that the building was very technologically advanced for its time: they had closed-circuit telephones, vacuum cleaners, a laundry machine, a refrigerator, and even showers with their very own water mixers that added shampoo directly into the stream!
As promised, the views from the house are beautiful, somewhat alpine, surrounded by pine trees in the mountains, but the real spectacle is outside, when you walk out into the back garden to find an overlook with a clear view of the entire city of Portland the awesome Mt Hood behind it, right in the center like it’s a matte painting in a movie.
Before this trip I’d seen lots of pictures with this view and I always assumed it was one of those deep-focus shots that make it look like something is very close when it’s actually far away, but no, it really does look like that in person. It feels imposing, to see that huge rocky mountain in the distance.
This was our final activity for the day, although we still had a nearly 30-minute drive back to our apartment ahead of us. I am exhausted from all the walking up and down a million bookshelves and a garden and a mansion, but it’s also been an amazing day.
Tomorrow: we go on a tour of the Columbia River Gorge! Stay tuned!
This Is A Lake 