Posts Categorized: spirit guides

Hiking in Portland: Forest spirits

If you asked me to pick one beautiful thing that sets Portland apart, my answer would be immediate: the forest. No other city has such a large forested park within the city limits, and very few other cities have such magnificent old-growth trees within walking distance of the breweries and coffee shops of the center city…. Read more »

Dear Toronto: None of what they said about Portland is true.

Yesterday someone posted a link to an article in the Toronto Sun. “Experience Portland like a local,” the headline read. “Can you point out the errors?” a friend (with a long history in journalism) asked, tagging me in her comments. I clicked over and read the first paragraph. The writer said she enjoyed Portland on previous… Read more »

Original Portlandians

Our tour guides are all Original Portlandians: we all have lived in a house share, have an opinion about how to brew coffee, and most of us don’t know where our sunglasses are or own an umbrella. We would rather ride our bikes to work, probably, and we know which bus takes you down Division Street and what the fifth quadrant is. We don’t know why, exactly, the Chinese people left Chinatown. We can’t quite figure out how to rationalize the racist past of Oregon with our striving present. We just don’t get why people like Voodoo so much.