The night we arrived we took the advice of a co-worker and visited Powell's City of Books. I have no pictures of this place, but it's huge. The building takes most of a city block. The sections are broken up by color coded room. There's lots of new and used stuff. Yummy expanded her collection of classic Nancy Drew prints while I found some copies of old "Shoe" comic strip collections. Yeah, we're on tight budgets, but that's why we kept ourselves to just those. We easily could have needed extra suitcases to get our books home.
Across the street is "Rocco's Pizza and Pasta". Again, visited on a recommendation. We got a hefty soda and monster sized slice of pizza for five bucks each. Not gourmet cuisine, but cheap and better than college cafeteria food. They had Pabst Blue Ribbon on tap if that tells you anything about the place.
The next day was the wedding. I'll cover that some other time.
Sunday we were back to being tourists. Breakfast was at Case Study Coffee on Sandy Blvd. We were told we had to try a few coffee places. Where wasn't important. Case Study Coffee was nice. I got some biscuit with mushrooms and a hard cheese I'd never heard of before. They have some interesting coffee machines. One dripped icy water onto a thin filter and through some grounds. It takes five and a half hours to make. There were some "pour over" devices I'd never heard of before and still don't comprehend.
Eventually, we got to the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. It looked to be a cloudy day so we were going with indoor attractions instead of the outdoor variety. The first thing we saw? This.
Since the tickets were reasonably prices we got tickets for several events. We toured this sub...
Yummy pet this tortoise...
I helped assemble this arch.
...and we visited the Omnimax theater and Planetarium. Omnimax is much like Imax, but the screen wraps around and over you to fill your vision almost completely. I've been wanting to take Yummy to the one in Hutchinson, KS, but when the opportunity was available I took it. The projection room has glass walls so you get to see the camera being loaded and run.
We left, went downtown, and started looking for food or whatever struck us. We followed some noise into a park where people dressed as anime characters were playing spin the bottle, the hugs edition. Strange, but whatever. As we continued up the street we found more and more people with spiky blue hair and attire better suited to Final Fantasy games. Turned out that we were passing near Kumoricon, an anime convention.
Silly man. You'll never get tentacle raped in that outfit. We ate somewhere and started making our way back to the car. Found that Portland has streetcars, too.
Yummy had heard about the funky pastries at Voodoo Donuts so we went there as well.
Is there a Kenny Rogers/voodoo connection? I counted nine pieces of Kenny Rogers memorabilia among all the voodoo decor. He doesn't seem to match the theme. We missed the zoo and Japanese Gardens. The Shanghai Tunnels appear to need a reservation, but I didn't see that until it was too late to get them. But, overall, a good time was had. The weather certainly supported Yummy's argument that we should move there. You should totally check it out.
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