Travel Postcard 2015 #2

So here I am in Vancouver reminiscing about the last week or so travelling through San Francisco, Portland and Seattle.  Not sure if I will get to describe my experiences through all three cities in this postcard, but I’ll see how I go.  Buckle in – it might be a long ride!

The big city feel of San Francisco, California was a bit of a change after driving through small towns in Texas and New Mexico.  Some of these small towns were cute and some were functional.  Like the towns I passed on the Turquoise Trail between Santa Fe and Albuquerque.  Madrid, New Mexico for example - a very small blink-and-you’ll-miss-it artsy/crafty town, much like Eureka Springs in the Ozarks of Arkansas.  Or San Antonio, New Mexico the functional hub for the Turquoise Trail.  But I also drove through quite a few “ghost” towns – towns with a small population, a (usually) clapped out diner, a small rusty gas station and a whole lot of derelict one story solitary buildings.  It was a little sad to see this part of America become so ignored, its old world charm now dusty and desperate.  It was almost like time passed these towns by and made them struggle for relevance.  It made me wonder where the people went, and when they finally knew to go.  What made these towns fail, I wonder?  Each of these towns felt desolate and isolated.  It’s funny but that was also the feeling I got during my stay in SFO.

It has been about 21 years since I was last in SFO.  When I was there, I was very young, and perhaps that had a lot to do with it.  In that last visit, SFO was interesting, full of vigour and life.  It was creative, edgy and interesting - the only dangerous part of the city then was within the Tenderloin District.  This time, it felt quite the opposite.  I saw sadness and desperation all over the city.  It wasn’t contained to the Tenderloin.  The homeless were very visible and very vocal, the crazy that these days often come with it, pouring out of their pores into the streets – crazy eyes, crazy stance, crazy deeds.

We stayed in the Mission District at the edge of the Castro, and walked all over this hilly city – to Union Square, to the Embarcadero, to Lombard Street, through Golden Gate Park, to the Legion of Honour, Chinatown, Little Saigon, Nob Hill – you name it.  SFO locals are known for their hard muscled butts – now I know why!  But walking is the best way to see a city and I have a bit of a phobia about navigating local public transport.  The pleasant side-effect is the much needed exercise to counter the American-portioned meals! 

Speaking of meals, I was a bit disappointed in the places we ate. All of them missed the mark somehow, but charged like wounded bulls.  From a Pan-Asian restaurant that only had Mexicans cooking the meals to a French restaurant that served steak tartare (my favourite) with potato crisps (packet chips) instead of toast. 

A couple of observations about SFO:

• We kept finding shoes all over the street.  Just half of a pair.  Usually in perfectly good order.  Not sure why…  thoughts?
• The city has a program for urban greenery.  Every house, media strip and in front of houses were many trees, pot plants and bushes.  All encouraged by the SFO local council.  The plants we saw heaps of, which I love were succulents.  All sorts, in pot plants in front of houses, on stairs, in planters, on window sills etc.  Very inspiring.
• I experienced my first SFO earthquake on our last morning.  It was about 6am and it woke it.  I thought it was a dream because there weren’t any after-shocks.  But I saw in the paper that I didn’t dream it.

From SFO, we travelled north to Portland, Oregon.  From the moment I landed in the city I felt totally at ease.  Portland is an interesting city and one that I felt totally comfortable in.  It’s known for its “quirky” nature, but that is what makes the city so interesting.  Its “quirky” nature is what made it develop an environmental action plan in the mid-90’s, resulting in a culture of active environmental conscience.  There are bikes everywhere and even a parking bay in the city for electric cars to recharge for free.  It also gave America its first female police officer in the early 1900’s, Ms Lola Baldwin.  But the “quirky” nature spills into more conventional quirkiness as well, including its annual Halloween celebration at the town’s Pioneer Square where people dress up as zombies and dance to the song “Thriller” by Michael Jackson all night.  Crazy wacky trendsters!

Portland, like SFO has its share of the homeless as well, but unlike SFO, they seem to be friendly and less angry at the world.  I even saw a homeless guy help a fellow tourist with directions to tourist attractions and to a food cart for some lunch.  Not to say that “undesirable” behaviour isn’t happening at all – just that it’s impact on others are well contained.  For example, while walking along the Willamette River (pronounced “will – LAM – it”) we saw three forms of drugs being consumed in the open by people sitting on park benches overlooking the river.  One guy was happily puffing on a make-shift crack pipe, a pair of guys sharing a rollie of weed and a pleasantly dressed middle-aged woman snorting cocaine from the mirror of her compact.  They didn’t have the crazy eyes of the SFO homeless or gave you the feeling that they would harass you.  They just went about their activities as if it was as natural as reading a book on a beautiful balmy evening by the river.

During our too-brief visit to Portland we hooked up with a walking tour, which was really interesting but a bit too long.  We only managed the sights in the city though, only having one full day in Portland.  But during our visit, we managed to find a couple of really great eating places, one recommended and accompanied by a good Aussie friend Pepita and her lovely husband Tim, a Portland local.  Every meal we had was great, flawless even – and totally affordable!

I found Portland and its residents to be relaxed and unassuming.  The city had a very chilled vibe to it, without the anxiety (status or otherwise) that I have found in other large cities like SFO, New York, Sydney and any place in Asia.  Parts of the city reminded me of Chicago in feel and architecture.  I really enjoyed the city and would definitely be back!  Here’s few of my observations on Portland:

• The founders of Portland tossed a penny to decide between calling the town Portland or Boston.  Not creative thinkers, these two as one came from Portland, Maine and the other from Boston, Massachusetts.  The penny can still be found in a museum in Portland.
• The nickname for Portland is “Stumptown” because the founders cut down trees to settle the towns, but didn’t have the ability to remove the stumps from the felled trees.  Early settlers on the Oregon Trail nicknamed it Stumptown to give others a truer picture of what they were getting themselves into.
• Portland is known for its high unemployment rate, at one time second behind Detroit for the highest rate in the US.  That drove people to start their own businesses, which birthed the food cart phenomenon in Portland.  There are heaps to choose from in the city and the turn-over rate means that new ones are always popping up.  Some great and affordable food to be had here – just ask that nice homeless guy!
• Portland has over 53 microbreweries within its city limits.  If you like craft beer, this is the place to be!
• For some reason, there isn’t sales tax on top of the ticketed price in Portland.  For those of you who struggle like I do about the price ++ in the US, it was great!
• Strangely, the predicted max temperatures don’t happen in the middle of the day, as I am used to, but late in the evening and into the night.  Not sure why, must be some geological reason…
• I have not seen as many elbow tattoos in residents of a city as I have in Portland.  In Sydney, the increasing trend is for neck tattoos.  But Portland, it seems to be elbow tatts.

From Portland we fly to Seattle, Washington.  I wasn’t too keen on Seattle.  It has a strange feel about it.  The entire time that I was there, it felt very much like a frontier town, much like Halifax, Nova Scotia or St John’s, Newfoundland in Canada.  Both those cities, like Seattle were built by the ocean.  The difference was that in Seattle, the people were less engaged, less friendly and the streets wider.  Aside from that, I kept thinking I was back in either of those towns in Canada during our Seattle visit.

While in Seattle, we stayed in Belltown, not far from Downtown.  We walked down to Pike Place markets, visited the outdoor Sculpture Garden and walked around the city a bit.  Unfortunately, the city didn’t feel as safe as it did in Portland.  Again, the number of homeless and displaced people was alarming, given the supposed wealth of this town (HQ to large companies like Microsoft).  And again, the homeless here had the same feel of crazy desperation as they did in SFO.  It made walking and visiting Seattle a little difficult, particularly because the disenfranchised seemed to be collecting in every park and overpass in the city, of which there are many to traverse if you want to see the city by foot.

All in all, I felt Seattle to be a rather boring city.  The people weren’t very engaging and the city didn’t have a creative, interesting or fun feel to it.  It felt very conservative and middle-class, with extremely expensive restaurants and cafes as our only eating options.  The couple of meals that we had in Seattle weren’t amazing either, but they weren’t cheap. 

My observations of Seattle:

• There is a lot of authorised graffiti and public art in the city and its surrounds.  Good to see.  A lot of the public art included totem poles.
• The Seattle Museum costs US$20 for entry to the general exhibition.  That’s ridiculously expensive for the common collection.  For a special exhibition, maybe but not for the common collection.
• In Australia, when you buy a parking ticket for your sidewalk parks from a machine, you leave it visible on the dashboard.  In Seattle, they are stuck on the inside window of the front seat closest to the sidewalk.
• Seattle really needs to do more about accurate and easy to understand signage.  We used public transport to get from the airport and to get to Vancouver.  It took forever to understand the signs to get from one platform to the right ones…
• There are quite a lot of new buildings (tall gleaming ones, ever competing in height and grandeur with its neighbours) in Seattle, with more on the way.  It doesn’t help to give the city a grounded feeling.

I think here is a good place to stop.  We are only a few days away from boarding our cruise to do the Inside Passage and Alaska.  Can’t wait – so very excited at the cruise and the opulence and excesses of being on a luxury cruise!  I’ll write next time about the adventures of getting to Vancouver and my overall impressions/observations of the US leg of the trip.  Yes, I know – Alaska and Hawaii is part of the trip to come, and they are also part of the US, but they are not part of the mainland, so I am drawing an “observations” line there!