I feel like less of a woman because I don't have a fixie

Portland has a lot of things. Bike paths. Fixies. Fedoras (though not as many as East Van). No sales tax. Microbreweries. Street vendors. Courteous drivers. Free transit in the downtown core.

You know what else it has that is kind of pleasing and surprising? Water fountains and tattoos. Seriously. There are water fountains to be had at rather regular intervals (and we've been taking advantage of them) and I swear to god at least 20% of the population here is tattooed.

Today we went for an hour long run. It just happened to coincide with lunch hour and I was surprised at the amount of people trying to bang off a few kilometres on their break. Beautiful run over two bridges. We had to stop on one as it had to let a ship through. Pretty cool. Then we walked through a few different districts of Portland (Chinatown, Restaurant Row, Belmont) before stopping to eat in the Hawthorne district which was pretty funky. I would recommend making the trek out if you're in Portland.

We walked back downtown through the city centre, the Pearl district and then back to Nob Hill. We totally lucked out scoring a hotel in Nob Hill. I really like it here. We went to Walgreens and I bought Michael some ice cream and a bottle of wine for $2.99. I just had to know what a $2.99 bottle of wine tasted like given that I had just spent $7.20 for a glass of the much vaunted Pinot Noir with dinner. And you know what? It was not the best bottle of wine I've ever had, but it tasted a lot like (the award winning) Barefoot Cellar's Cabernet Sauvignon which I routinely buy for $10 back home.

Oh, and we hit Powell's books which is a new and used book store which takes up an entire city block. In heaven much? I picked up "The Satanic Verses", "The Little Prince" and "We". It was actually pretty cool because I got an email from my local library that I have been accepted into their book club so I am totally looking forward to that come September.

Before we hit the book store we visited Graves' Portland Building and had a cool discussion about PoMo architecture and then noticed right next to that building was a building of classical design and we actually compared and contrasted the two and -maybe I'm stupid and need to research it a bit - but it's almost like Graves built his after studying the classical one across the street and getting some inspiration from it. And, oddly, the building next to the classical one is a rather brutalist modern building and we kind of marvelled at the architectural trifecta and then we discussed modernism versus the more gilded, baroque architecture and I made a comment and Michael (with his Masters of Architecture) said "you could write a thesis about that" but I'm not going to tell you what I said in case I decide to quit my job and become and architect.

Please send me a million dollars so I don't have to come home.