I had a window seat on our plane, which was coming in after 9 o'clock at night, so I had a chance to observe Portland at night from the air. It doesn't look like Phoenix. Not even close. I saw lots of little green lights. Eventually little orange lights also joined the mix. They looked a lot like a mass of Christmas tree lights spread over the ground. Despite the lights there were very few parts of Portland that lit up the sky. While Phoenix's nighttime skyline consists of bright, orderly squares of light that seem to impose their will on the dark, Portland's lights were irregular and looked more like bright spoltchs on the Earth.
When we left the airport it was nice and crisp outside. The kind of weather we don't have in Phoenix very often. It was very cool, but not cold. I had packed a couple of coats for the trip in anticipation of the weather and my light rain coat was enough to keep me warm.
We picked up our rental car at the airport. I've actually never rented a car at the airport before, and found it quite a painless process. I found my way onto the freeway and the first thing I noticed was that almost all the drivers were driving the speed limit. It was very annoying to this speedy Phoenix driver.
It was after 10 when we got to Clackamas (the Portland suburb where we were staying), and I was quite hungry. I stopped at Gustov's to find out how late they were going to be open. It turned out they were open until midnight on Friday nights. (Try and get decent food in Phoenix after 10; it's not really possible).
We dropped our stuff off, said hello to our hosts, and headed back to Gustov's. I decided I wanted a German beer, and I wanted to try something new. The Spaten bock was described on the menu as having a malty taste giving way to light hops and a slightly sweet finish. It sounded perfect, and when it came it tasted exactly the way the menu described (although I have no idea what malt tastes like). Spaten bock is totally a beer I dig.
The waitress dropped the bread off at our table. I remembered the bread wasn't that good the last time I was at Gustov's so I didn't expect much. Well it seems they have spent some time improving their bread because this time it was really tasty. It was sour dough (even though they call it "European bread") and it had a crisp crust and a somewhat dense center (for comparison, denser than a baguette). The waitress then brought out my salad. It was a German style salad with lettuce and greens topped with julienned jicama and beets, and served with a blue cheese dressing. It was pretty good, but you have to like German style salad.
I had a tough time deciding what to have as my entree since there were so many things on the menu that sounded good. I was trying to decide between the sausages, lamb, and duck; I like lamb and duck, but I hardly get a chance to eat them, and I remember really loving the sausages the last time I was at Gustov's. When our waitress came Noah ordered the sausage trio so I felt free to order the lamb shank since I knew I'd at least have the opportunity to taste the sausages. When our food arrived I tried my lamb shank and it was very tender, but the red wine in sauce only seemed to bring out the gaminess of the lamb. It was good, but I don't like gamey. I decided to try the sausages in Noah's sausage trio, which came with a bratwurst, a bierwurst, a wiesswurst, and some German potato salad. Well, the sausages weren't grilled like I remembered last time, so they weren't as tasty as they should have been. (Maybe I remembered them incorrectly?) The bratwurst was good, the bierwurst was ok, and the wiesswurst was nasty (but wiesswurst is a nasty sausage anyway if you ask me). The highlight of the entire plate was the German potato salad, which was damn tasty.
I finished dinner with a bavarian cream. It was mild, quite soft, and good in an understated sort of way, but a little too mild for me. I thought the panna cotta I had at Bacco's in New Orleans was much better.
Overall I would say that this dinner was disappointing, but the menu as Gustov's is very diverse so I'm willing to give them another chance. (Actually I would have given them another chance in that trip if Noah would have let me.)
I woke up Saturday morning and it was freezing. As I tried to work up the necessary courage to leave the bed I checked my handy travel alarm clock (which also tells temperature) and found out that it was 63 degrees in the room. No wonder I was freezing! Anyway, I got up and took a shower. When I got back into the room I discovered the reason the room was so cold; the window was open the entire time.
When we left the house I had two jackets and a beanie on.
One of the sites I wanted to see while in Portland was the Japanese Garden, which is located in Washington Park, the same park as the International Rose Test Garden. The Rose Garden is free, and I like roses, so I decided to check it out. It was very large, and had a lot of roses, but for some reason I didn't find it impressive. Maybe I needed different company for it?
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Having walked around the Rose Garden a bit we took the shuttle to the Japanese Garden. I thought it would be really far away if they had a shuttle, but it turns out that it would have been just a short hike.
The Japanese Garden was simply amazing. I can't adequately explain it so it's a good thing I took some pictures.
Some time while we were walking around Noah found the gift shop. Bastard. I spent more money there than I wanted to. One of the things I bought was a cloth origami kimono Christmas ornament for me and Lynn's Christmas tree. I thought it was kind of representative of our meeting Japanese class.
After a few hours of walking the Japanese Garden we left and looked for the Saturday Market. While I printed out directions to every place I was planning on going I didn't get directions to the Saturday Market, mainly because it was very large and I assumed easy to find. Needless to say we couldn't find the place. We drove around for a while before we figured out we were on the wrong side of the river. Being on the wrong side of the river would be a running theme of our time navigating around Portland.
Once we crossed the river the location of the Saturday Market was obvious, and we even got a cheap parking spot. I was ready to eat as soon as we got out of the car, and luckily there was a large food court. The first stall I noticed served East African food. I'd never had East African food before, but I'm willing to try most cuisines at least once. I had a split pea fritter, and chicken turnovers with a chili-lime sauce. The chili-lime sauce was something extremely similar to a Belizean sauce made with almost the exact same ingredients, and it was excellent. [Actually the chicken turnover was also very similar to Belizean turnovers too, now that I think about it.] Everything was excellent. The split pea fritter was good enough to give me hope that eventually I may go an entire day without eating meat.
The East African food was good, but it only teased my appetite instead of satisfying it. We walked around the food court some more and I got a Chinese hum baw (steamed barbecue pork bun) and a big shrimp fritter stuffed with all sorts of vegetables. The hum baw wasn't very good, but the shrimp fritter was pretty decent.
It didn't take us long to look through all the stalls at Saturday Market so we walked to Chinatown and found out there was a Chinese garden! It looked pretty cool from the outside, but admission was $6 and we didn't feel like paying to see another garden. There's not a whole lot in the Portland Chinatown we could find so I decided to find a Chinese bakery. A Chinese bakery wasn't hard to find. I looked for one of those custard stuffed buns from dim sum, but couldn't one so I got a cream bun instead (it was stuffed with cream filling and topped with coconut). It wasn't bad, but not nearly as good as the custard stuffed buns at C-Fu Gourmet.
We were tired of walking so we went back to the car so we could do a little driving for a change. I had such a good time at the McMenamins Kennedy School the last time I was in Portland that I wanted to check out one of their other historical locations. I knew the McMenamins Crystal Ballroom was in the area so I looked for the place so me and Noah could get a beer or something, but we couldn't find it. The buildings in downtown Portland don't display building numbers, which makes finding anything by address a little difficult, and I don't think the Crystal Ballroom has a sign either so it's no wonder we didn't find the place. Maybe we were on the wrong side of the river again? One of Joan's (one of our hosts) favorite places is McMenamins Edgefield, outside of town, so we decided to go there instead.
We didn't have nearly as difficult a time finding Edgefield as we did not finding the Crystal Ballroom. The grounds were nice with a hotel, a few bars, and a wine bar. For some reason I couldn't convince Noah to get a beer, but he was ready to drink as soon as he saw the wine bar. Sparkling and dessert wines were the only wines I could really stand so I tried their "Extra Dry" champagne, "Blancs de Noir 1999", "Briarwood Marionberry wine", and "Pinot Gris Ice Block" dessert wine. I didn't care for the champagnes or berry wine, but the Pinot Gris was exceptional. I ended up buy a bottle and Noah ended up buy a couple of bottles of some other stuff.
We still had time to kill before the show so I was ready for dinner. We drove from Edgefield all the way back into west Portland. I think the neighborhood was Washington, but whatever its name it was obvious that we were in a yuppie area of town; you could tell by all the expensive looking speciality markets, wine shops, and vast abundance of restaurants. Portland is an odd mix of things: residential and business, yuppies, hippies, and homeless. Two miles in any direction seems to bring dramatic changes in neighborhoods. The odd thing was that I was actually more comfortable there than in Scottsdale.
I was in the neighborhood to find Marrakesh Authentic Moroccan restaurant, a restaurant Joan and Vicki (the other host) told me about. I'd never had Moroccan before, and was unlikely to find a Moroccan restaurant in Phoenix so it sounded like the place to try. When me and Noah got there and looked at their menu on the wall (I love the practice of putting a menu on the outside of a restaurant so passers by can look to see if it piques their interest) it was filled with lamb dishes (and a couple of chicken ones too). I had just eaten lamb the night before at Gustov's, and was completely not in the mood to eat it again. It was a shame too since I wanted to try a tagine after reading so much about them in "A Cook's Tour".
We walked around and looked at all sorts of restaurants, but none of them appealed to me for some reason. Eventually we found a place called Beau Thai (which, not surprisingly, served Thai food). My instincts told me not to eat there because of their too cute name, and the neighborhood, but it was the best looking place I had seen all night. Sure enough their decor was very hip, and the dining room was full of affluent people. It didn't bode well for the food.
We started with miang khao, a combination of crunchy rice, toasted coconut, lemon grass, lime, garlic, chicken, peanuts, and onion eaten on iceberg lettuce leaves. The combination sounded good, but I didn't care for the actual experience. Something about it just didn't taste good to me. We also had Thai wontons, which had a curry flavored chicken and tofu filling. When we got them they were cold, and it was obvious that they were frozen when they were fried. I should have sent them back, but Noah kept eating them so I just let it be. My entree was neau sawan, thinly sliced beef marinated with Thai spices, with a papaya salad. It tasted like bool kogi! Now that was something I could be happy about. The papaya salad was nasty, and tasted like it was soaked in fish sauce. (I later learned that papaya salad is made with fish sauce, but I've had plenty of Vietnamese dishes with fish sauce and this was the first dish I've had that reeked of the it.)
I was unhappy with the food at Beau Thai, and learned that I should have trusted my instincts about the place.
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When we were finished with dinner we still had a couple of hours before the started. We had nothing better to do so we went to find the venue where the show was being held. The place was named B Complex, and we had a hell of a time finding the place. We drove up and down a dark alley in a warehouse district looking for the place. Eventually we saw some ratty looking kids who looked like they were going to the same show. We found the place by following them. B Complex had a tiny sign that said "320" (the address) that was right in front of a walkway that led to an unmarked door. The entrance reminded me more of a crack house than a club.
We sat around for a couple of hours waiting for the show to start. There wasn't much to see or do, but we did see some kid with a cool homemade Optimus Prime costume which included tinfoil covered beer cans (two Coors Light "Master Cylinder"s if I wasn't mistaken) for gas tanks. It was pretty great for its cheesiness and originality. There was also a mix album playing with some cool Halloween type hip-hop songs. Hearing songs that samples of some guy saying, "The wolfman," and hearing a distant howl definitely added to the atmosphere. I wish I knew what the album was.
The show started with Bonobo, a Ninja Tune artist I'd never heard of before, and the music he played was pretty good. He played downbeat stuff, but it was still fun at the same time. Next up was Prefuse 73, another Ninja Tune artist I'd never heard of. He actually did a live set, and his music was a strange sort of hip-hop kind of thing. It was a great show. Bonobo and Prefuse 73 both put on such good shows that I determined that I'd have to listen to their stuff in the future. [As it turns out I like Bonobo's music almost as much as Amon Tobin. There are some Prefuse 73 songs I like, but I thought he was much better live.]
Amon Tobin came on, and I was disappointed in his set; it was faster than the songs he normally makes, and the songs of his own that he played were the ones I don't like. Noah liked Amon Tobin's set better than I did, but he didn't have any problems leaving before the set was over.
During the drive back to Clackamas me and Noah talked about some of the things we noticed about Portland. There are a lot of smelly people in Portland. Throughout the entire day we kept running across stinky people, much more than you'd find in Phoenix over the course of a month. Noah also wondered where the hot women were. I had to admit that during the course of day we never saw one chick we would classify as hot. It really made me appreciate Phoenix in both respects.
I wanted to take Joan and Vicki out to dinner, as a thank you for letting me and Noah stay at their place, but it never worked out that way so I took them out to lunch instead. Mickey Finn's was just down the street from their house, and that's where they wanted lunch. I had fish and chips (made with halibut) with coleslaw, and a beer. The beer was good, but the fish was greasy, and the coleslaw sucked. Mickey Finn's wasn't for me, but Joan and Vicki seemed to enjoy their meals so that was all that was import.
At the airport I got a small box of JaCiva's chocolate truffles, which I remembered seeing featured on the Food TV show "Food Finds". I should have known better than to buy chocolate at the airport, fresher being better when it comes to chocolate, but I don't think the JaCiva's would have been that much better if it was fresh. I really would have to try it fresh to give it a fair chance though.
I added up how much I spent on this trip and it was $406 total. That's expensive for just a show, but it was worth it for the good time. Of course it's not something I would repeat anytime soon.
Isn't it was funny that the best food I had all trip was from a little East African food stall at a swapmeet? I would have thought it would have been from Gustov's, but it didn't work out that way.
The camera I used was a Canon Powershot G2 digital camera, and since the pictures are the only real reason to look at this page I hope they look good.
The pictures are copyright by me. Unauthorized use is prohibited.
