Portland Reunion

We just returned from our Portland adventure last night. David, Kathryn, and I drove down to Portland Thursday afternoon and spent Thursday, Friday and Saturday hanging out with Erin and Cary. It was quite nice to be reunited. On Thursday we went into downtown, somewhere around 23rd street, and checked out some shops, etc., then we had dinner at "the Bon" (Lewis & Clark's cafeteria). Then we went and saw the theater production that's going on right now, Iphigenia, the Greek tragedy and Bash, which was a set of two monologues. It was all really good. We met lots and lots of Erin's friends, including Erin's roomie, Lishka, who is super-nice. On Friday just David, Kathryn, and I went into downtown. Parking didn't go so well to begin with, as I ended up in some crazy parking lot where everyone double-parks and blocks one another in, and I had to back out of it. That was bad. Then we ended up parking across the street in a garage, where they take your keys in case you end up blocking someone in. It was rather sketchy since they really had no apparent system for remembering whose keys belong to whom/which car. So I was relatively convinced that my car was not going to be there when I got back. We proceeded to check out NikeTown and walk around the riverfront before getting lunch at Chipotle, which is comparable to Taco Del Mar. I remember all my Franklin friends were semi-obsessed with the delicousness of Chipotle, but I had never been... I don't know if we even have any in Washington...

We met up with Erin and Cary again around three in the afternoon on Friday, picked up a parking permit and David, Erin and Cary started up a game of four-square. This ended up attracting an enormous number of people, of course, as it always does for some reason. So that was entertaining. And all this time the weather was in the high-60s, low-70s, it was quite nice. We ended up going to a Cajun restaurant for dinner called Montage, which had good macaroni and not so good Gumbo and terrible service. The food was fairly good, but the service was pretty awful even though they make amazing foil animals out of the leftovers.

Then yesterday morning all of us (except Erin who had to do a tour and then go to rehearsal) went to the Saturday market then took the MAX over to the area Powell's is in, checked out a few thrift stores, went to Rocco's for pizza (well David and Cary had pizza, my system can't exactly handle it yet), then eventually went over to Powell's bookstore, browsed around for a while and then got seats at the PostSecret lecture by Frank Warren, which was very cool. After that we walked back to the car, took a couple pictures by the riverfront and then headed back home. And that's all to report for now, but more soon. :-) Ari