Land of Ports

"Well Portland, Oregon", sings Loretta Lynn, "if that ain't love then tell me what is." I rolled in off the 5:30 Seattle train, and made my way to Lewis and Clark College, the next victim of Uni in the USA inclusion, conveniently also the home of my next host. Walking from the train station to the pick up point for the L&C shuttle was a surreal experience. Portland seemed to be the perfect incarnation of the American Dream City. The streets are broad and unpolluted, the pavements wide and made of lovely brick, meticulously free of any speck of litter or dirt. Trees and statues of Snow-White-esque woodland creatures are positioned at strategically charming intervals along the precisely uniform grid system. There appear to be very few inhabitants cluttering things up. Immaculate sky-scrapers loom over the ghostly scene.

Lewis and Clarke was a lovely place to spend six days; it's a little Liberal Arts College with a small but beautiful campus overlooking the Oregon countryside and the terrifying volcanoes of Mt St Helens and Mt Hood. My hostess was a French girl, Coline, whom I met through mutual acquaintance rather than couchsurfing, and the fact that she wasn't American didn't seem to a hindrance to being as incredibly kind as the folks I'd stayed with in Seattle. In fact, she was working as a language assistant in the College, and lived with three other charming language assistants from China, Japan and Siberia, all of whom were equally friendly and welcoming. I even had a bed to sleep on, a luxury I hadn't experienced in many months. Horrah!

The days were spent in a fairly relaxed fashion: after "doing" L&C I crossed the river to the slightly more famous Liberal Arts rival Reed College, which had an equally nice campus but a totally different atmosphere. I also had time to have a look around Portland (which had a lot more soul to it than my first impressions suggested), and on the weekend Coline and I hit the famous Saturday Market, which was an incredible blitz of salespeople with eccentric ideas such as making loads of brilliant decorations out of cutlery, or wallets out of duct-tape, and interesting food choices. In the end we opted for Voodoo Donuts, a fantastic underground cult venue with types of pastries that Doctor Seuss would be proud of inventing, and pictures on the plaster-peeling walls that would have made Andy Warhole's brain salivate. There were Voodoo Donuts T-shirts and underwear on sale. Apparently people have been married in there.

The famously changeable Portland weather was largely stable during my stay, with one or two sublime cloudless days towards the end. My last day in Portland was Lewis and Clark's graduation day, so I got to witness the spectacle of hundreds of be-gowned graduates and professors in colourful costumes listening to coming-of-age speeches and finally throwing their mortar boards in the air just like they're supposed to. Reed is even more extravagant, since apparently they have a whole ceremony for burning their papers after they've finished with them. Anyways, after eating as many cookies and complementary pastries as it is possible to consume at the post-graduation reception, I jumped on a bus, sat on it for 17 hours, and arrived in the one and only Bay Area.