Portland, Oregon

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Portland is a very funky city in the Northwestern corner of Oregon (and therefore in northwestern corner of USA overall), and is a similar size as Sheffield (in fact, very similar indeed. It's just 3 square miles smaller and has only 40,000 less people). Famous primarily for it's music scene, it's home to The Decemberists, The Dandy Warhols, Everclear and Modest Mouse (who I'd not heard of till I came to the US, but almost everyone I've met loves them and they're actually pretty good - this song is especially famous and is on the radios all the time

) amongst others. I stayed in a really friendly Hostelling International (who have about 80 hostels situated in all the big cities around the country) hostel, and as per usual, met lots of new awesome people. It's also famous for the Micro Brewery culture it has, so you can go to a local pub and almost all of the beers will be made by local independent breweries. I'd lost my ID by this point but it wasn't that strict and I could mostly just go in and sit at a table and someone else could just buy the drinks.

The first day there I went on a free walking tour of the area (which for anyone travelling I recommend strongly, even if the tour itself isn't great then it's perfect for meeting others from the hostel), where I learnt about the micro-breweries and the Portland tradition of being able to sit in a Cinema and order a beer or a glass of wine while you watch a film (damn American English is getting to me! I originally typed movie before replacing it with film). Also turns out that Matt Groening (creator of Simpsons) is from Portland, and alot of the characters take their names from places in Portland (there's a Flanders Street, a North Van Houten Avenue and a Montgomery Park, as well as several others). On this walking tour I met 2 people who I ended up spending almost a week with, travelling up to Seattle with them and staying at the same hostel.

The next day I went to the International Rose Garden, a large lawn full of 7000+ roses, which was really nice with an ice cream in the sunshine, then I went to check out Powell's, the world's largest independent bookstore. It buys around 3000 used books today, and it's inventory has over 4 million books. While there I bought 2, one on linguistics (which I bought after reading and really enjoying Bill Bryson's book on English) and one called Myths and Facts about Marijuana (an objective scientific study on cannabis and it's effects, which although I haven't read yet looks really interesting. It basically comes to the conclusion that there are no adverse effects of smoking cannabis, and that there are no health risks even after long term high dosage use).

That evening there was a gig at the hostel, where a really good singer songwriter called Amanda West played, followed by an open mic. I didn't realise but you had to sign up before hand to play in, but I did a couple of acoustic songs anyway, after the microphone and amps had been taken down. It was actually really enjoyable, Amanda came and joined in with me, followed by a few other musicians there, and we had a really fun jam session for about half an hour. The next day I took the 4 hour bus ride with Tal (an Australian from the walking tour) up to Seattle.

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