Sidetripping Sideways

One can day trip from Portland in any direction - my perennial favorites are to the west and the east (more on those to come). Most recently, however, we sidetripped sideways, an hour southwest of town, to the Willamette Valley wine country.

Oregon is no Napa; there are no fake chateaus here, or $400-a-plate restaurants. But we still have three critical assets: rolling vistas of vineyards and farmland; enough foot traffic for wineries to invest in pretty tasting rooms with regular hours; and decent wines (sorry, Virginia - it wasn't meant to be).

Putting a spring into my step:
my very first 10K.

Now, truth be told, we decided to spend the day in McMinnville - the population epicenter of Oregon's still-growing wine region - for entirely non-wine related reasons. I had found a small 10K race organized by a local school and decided it was time to cross item 16 off my list of life goals ("16. Run a 10K"). And we had a lovely gift certificate to a McMinnville restaurant only open for dinner. We figured we could fill the interim seven hours with the wine-related stuff.

The wine-related stuff

A friend once described her mixed feelings for New Orleans by explaining that it's where the South goes to get ugly. I sometimes feel that way about the wine region around McMinnville: at our first stop last Saturday, when it was just barely noon, we shared the tasting room with two bachelorette parties and a birthday party. An hour later, driving the winding country roads between vineyards, we passed a white stretch Hummer limousine that looked as out of place as rhinestones on a nun's wimple. 

Here's my understanding: if you are serious about wine (which we, frankly, are not), you would limit yourself to two, maybe three tastings in a day - at which point, your palette is spent. You should only need a few sips of each wine to evaluate it, and you likely want to spit out most of those sips so the alcohol doesn't fuzzy your senses. But that's not what people do, so it's no longer what the industry expects.

People go wine-tasting to get drunk. Tasting rooms thus charge, on average, $10 for a flight of one-ounce pours (which is a fair value, if you're actually drinking the wine). There is an expectation that you might visit half-a-dozen wineries in an afternoon. Indeed, small towns like Dundee and Carlton consist almost entirely of winery tasting rooms, so you could sample a dozen different wineries on foot in the course of a couple hours. Like a wine crawl. This is not my scene.

Welcome to PDX

We have lived in Portland now longer than Jeff and I ever lived in the Netherlands, yet since moving here in 2011, I have written nothing about our Oregon lifestyle. This is likely because, Portland being my hometown, the novelty factor of day-to-day life here is low. But it's a missed opportunity since Portland is so rich with material, especially when it comes to "lifestyle." (See generally Portlandia.)

To ease us into more Portland-centric updates, allow me to introduce the city through a brief FAQ:

So what is this Portlandia you speak of?
Before it was a quirky tv show, Portlandia was (and still is) the name for the statue on top of the Portland Building at Fifth and Main downtown. Portlandia was made in the Maryland suburbs of DC in the early 1980s – just like Jeff! Little known fact: I was once Portlandia for Halloween. Relatively better known fact: Portlandia is the second-largest hammered copper statue in the U.S. – after the Statue of Liberty.

Wow, who knew! Any other neat factoids about Portland?
Why yes: Portland is the only city in the U.S. with a volcano within the city limits. (My sister tells me that's actually volcanoes.) And yes, that includes Hawaii.

Other key selling points for the State of Oregon: No sales tax. All beaches are public. And you don’t pump your own gas. (Unless you’re me, in which case you don’t pump your own gas anywhere. It's a native Oregonian's prerogative.)

Does it really rain all the time?
Weeeeelllll .... yeah. Except August and September, which are reliably sunny and warm with no humidity - just like the best weather of Southern California. Which of course raises the question: Why don't we just live in Southern California year-round? (Answer: But then we'd have to pay sales tax, pump our own gas, and live next door to Californians. You just can't win.)

Why do people laugh when I say "Willamette"?
The "will-a-MET" is a river in Illinois; Portland's river is the "Will-LAAAM-ette." My non-native husband has drawn my attention to many of our local pronunciation idiosyncrasies:

• Oregon: Not "Or-e-GONE," but "Or-e-GUN"
• Tigard (suburb, also a famous Supreme Court case): Not "TEE-gard," but "TIE-gard"
• Tualatin (suburb next to Tigard): I can't even recreate how Jeff tries to pronounce this suburb. It's "Too-all-a-tin."
• Glisan (Portland street): Not "GLISS-an," but "GLEE-san" 
• Albina (another street): Not "AL-bin-a," but "All-BYE-na"
• Couch (yet another street): The doozy of them all, pronounced "COOCH"

So what's up with all this food and hipster stuff the New York Times is always talking about?
If you build it, they will come? Portland in the '70s, '80s, and '90s made a concerted effort to control development and build liveable communities. In the '00s, this started to draw some national attention. Young, idealistic and/or artistic people started moving here, it got a reputation, and now we have New Portland: hip, creative, resoundingly liberal, and determinedly crunchy.

As for the food, that's a mystery to me. All you need to know is that Portland has some of the best damn food in the country. Seriously. Our waistlines will never be the same.

If there's a New Portland, is there an Old Portland?
New Portland is just a veneer; Old Portland still makes this place tick. What is Old Portland? (Cue Neko Case's ode to her hometown, Tacoma.) It's a little bit parochial, a little bit redneck, lightly industrial, and so unpretentious as to be at times frustrating (if you don't wear jeans out to dinner, you may be looked at askance). It's mundane, working class, damp, sometimes gritty, often quirky, and retro not in the cool sense but in the we never bothered to renovate sense. It's the raw material the hipsters have to work from, but it will be here long after the hipsters leave.

On the grim side, Portland has a long history of racism and exclusion, a high rate of depression and mental illness, and a growing meth problem. But there's still a lot to love. Portland is a deeply democratic city; everything is community-oriented. I remember as a teenager voting in a local neighborhood meeting for what kind of community development I did and didn't like. People care here - maybe even too much. Which is why the hipsters fit right in.

So why is Portland named “Portland” anyway?
I thought you'd never ask you. 

Portland was founded in 1851 by Asa Lovejoy and Francis Pettigrove (you can’t make this stuff up). They each wanted to name the new city after their hometown: Boston, Massachusetts, and Portland, Maine, respectively. Naturally, they settled the dispute with a coin toss – which Pettigrove won.

You will find almost as many places in Portland named after Lovejoy and Pettigrove as Lewis and Clark. Because while Lewis and Clark showed up first, “Lovejoy and Pettigrove” is just more fun to say.

Pettygrove Park, next to Lovejoy Fountain.
(Test for Portlanders: Do you know where this is?)

Japan: Just Like in the Movies

Japan makes fun movies. Really good, arty movies, yes - but generally speaking, if I want art, I'll read a book (personal preference).

We prepared (and decompressed) from our Japan trip by watching a silly amount of not-serious Japanese movies - which led to a lot of gleeful "that's just like in that movie!" or "that's just like in Japan!" To illustrate, five of my favorites (complete with Maggie haikus):

Train Man (2005)

online geeks unite!

makeover of nerd to woo

rich girl from subway

Train Man combines that classic rom-com motif of geek makeover with mild commentary on the then-new world of online socializing. It's a light movie.

Akihabara at night: prime time.

"That's just like in that movie!" Meet Akihabara, the neon-lit consumer technology district of Tokyo. Tokyo has a neighborhood for everything: teenage girls (Harajuku), disconnected expats (Roppongi), plastic food (Kappabashi). Akihabara is for the computer geeks; megastores akin to Best Buy but with entire floors dedicated to the most advanced technology in toilet seats anchor buzzing streets lined with small discount stores and parts shops with bins of electronic bric-a-brac piled on the sidewalks. Pachinko parlors and video arcades glare with florescent lighting and pavlovian chiming. Females are few, other than those dressed in costume advertising various forms of male entertainment (school girls, yes, but also Princess Leias).

Other contextualizing Tokyo movies: Shall We Dance? (note the role of the elevated JR train lines throughout the film); Lost in Translation (speaking of disconnected expats in Roppongi). Granted, Lost in Translation is not Japanese and not even particularly sympathetic to Japanese culture - for the Japanese version of the same themes, I recommend Murakami's After Dark.

Konnichiwa

As the daughter of a journalist, I am convinced that a major component of the skill of traveling well is the ability to talk to people - something that does not come easily to us introverts. (Indeed, this is something I've written about before, in the context of our trip to Morocco and traveling by myself in Utrecht.) After our two weeks in Japan, I decided that such interactions are only partly dependent on serendipity - there is a science to this, too. 

The samurai district of Kanazawa: talking about a closed society...

In a country like Japan, reputedly a closed society hard for casual visitors to crack, having actual conversations with the Japanese requires some forethought. Here are four places to start:

A Tourist's History of Japan

Not all World Heritage sites are created equal (Wieliczka salt mines and D.F. Wouda pumping station, I'm looking at you). 

But Japan does it right: their sites are entertaining and educational. Those in western Honshu, the heartland of Japanese tourism, provide a CliffsNotes of the country's history - what every visitor ought to know about Japan. To illustrate, here's what we learned from the region's many UNESCO sites.

1. Itsukushima Shrine (500s)

Shintoism

The story: Mt. Misen on the island of Itsukushima (colloquially known as Miyajima) has been worshipped since pretty much forever. The island came to be so sacred, no one could be born or die there, and commoners were verboten. 

A Shinto shrine was established at the base of the mountain in the sixth century, though the present buildings date merely from the 1200s. They sit on stilts over the water; it is said that at high tide (if you squint your eyes right and tilt your head just so), the shrine looks as though it were floating. 

Miyajima's famous torii gate and ninja deer

I read someplace that this design allowed commoners to visit the shrine without ever setting foot on the sacred island: they would steer their boats through the giant torii gate set out in the sea and approach the "floating" shrine by water. Whatever the original purpose of the sea-bound torii gate, it is now one of the most photographed landmarks in Japan. Indeed, the entire island of Miyajima is considered one of the three most scenic places in the country. (Yes, there's a list for that.)

What is Shinoism? The "native" religion of Japan, Shintoism is closely tied to nature and is heavy on the ancestor worship. Shinto traditions are still a major component of Japanese life, even though most Japanese describe themselves as non-religious.

The highlights: 

• The central streets of the village of Miyajima are thick with the Japanese domestic tourism industry (toy shops, candy stores, cheesy restaurants), which provide an anthropological adventure for foreigners. 
• The sea around Hiroshima is known for its giant oysters, which in season are sold on the streets of Miyajima, grilled in their shells to order.

Making momiji at the Traditional Crafts Center

• Miyajima is also known for a cake-like cookie (momiji manju) filled with sweet bean paste, which you can watch being made by Rube Goldberg-esque machines at many of the aforementioned candy stores. Better yet, head to the Miyajima Traditional Crafts Center (just to your left as you exit the ferry terminal) to take a short momiji-making class. We took ours with a teenaged school group, which kindly helped tutor us in the fine art of cookie flipping. 
• Like Nara (see below), Miyajima is home to free-ranging deer. Unlike Nara, these deer are aggressive when you try to eat your momiji in front of them. Seriously, one reared up on its hind feet at me. Not charmed. But from afar, they add character to your photos of the shrine.
• Miyajima is a good option for a romantic night in a traditional inn, at least if you don't have kids in tow. This is where we had our fabulous/fascinating experience at the People's Lodge, complete with our multi-course haute cuisine feast (as described in a prior post). 

Good to know: I highly recommend taking a class at the Traditional Crafts Center as a brief and light-hearted introduction to the local culture. Miyajima is easy to reach from Hiroshima; you do not need a car on the island. Note your JR rail pass covers the JR ferry.

Educational Value: Medium
Entertainment Value: High
Kid appropriate? Yes, but keep them away from the deer.