Portalando!

It is a peculiar feeling to be heading to the again for the 3rd time in a year. It is the first time in my life I had done so, spending 3 weeks in NYC and the surrounding regions in May (Summer)...

Family trips are always fun

another 2 weeks in NYC in Oct (autumn)..

Biz trip to the UN..hence the silly heels in the park

and now, 5 weeks in Portland, Oregon (Winter!). Up til about 5 days before I left, I was still pronouncing it ‘Or-re-gon(e)’, until someone casually mentioned “Ohhhh…!! Ore-gen! How wonderful!”

Maybe I got it mixed up with the spice….

Anyways, I was excited because (1) I was on a course to study a particular branch in psychology (Yay! Time to be a student again!) and (2) I got to wear my winter clothes I stocked up on my last NYC trip! I have come to conclude that apart from tweezers, boots are girl’s best friends.

Oh and yes, I must also (obligingly) point out that (3) I get to meet sis and Dan again after more than 6 months!!!

Travelling with them is a total treat because sis is a great planner (and knows all these places to go and discounts to get) and Dan is a great companion for stupid adventures. And chicken-eating.

Chicken whores at work

So the first 5 hours was non-stop yakking about what’s been happening for them, and what’s been happening at home. – like Mom scolding dad stupid for putting cucumbers into Asam curry. Sigh. What would I do without my family? We settled into the apartment that I got for my 1 month stay here. It was a cosy decent place that was quite aesthetically pleasing.

Living on the sofa and out of my luggage

Sis went ahead to book us all Beginner Snowboard classes and passes for Saturday at the ski resort about 1.5hrs drive from Portland – Mt Hood, that was part of the ..um…. Mt Hood National Forest. Yes. That is it’s name. I did not make it up just because I have occasional amnesia bouts in my Geographical knowledge.

The drive there was beautiful. We drove along the famous Columbia River highway that embraced us with spectacular views of the Mt Hood river (I didn’t make that up either) and up up up toward the top of the mountain where it started to get chilly. At the corner of my eye I noticed a snow-covered car whiz by, and it seemed so totally out of place amongst the green trees and bright skies. Well, 5 minutes later, snow started falling onto the windscreen. It is amazing how little bits of frozen water can thrill a fully grown adult. At least 2 of us in the car, not the other 2 who spent several weeks freezing their Chinese asses off in the cold. In fact, poor (why does he always get referred to as ‘poor’ in this blog??) Dan had to dig out his Alpaca sweater for me from the bottom of their perfectly packed knapsack, as they were not intending to head into snow anymore on this trip. Ah well. The price you have to pay to watch a pig on a snowboard.

Suited up and ready to roll...

Goat on board

We grabbed all our snowboard equipment in a hurry, and made our way out into the snow for our first snowboard lesson! We learnt how to strap up, glide down gentle slopes, turn left and rights and of course, brake. Then, it was up to the elementary slope 'Buttercup'!

Board meet snow. Snow meet board. Butt meet snow. Snow meet ass crack.

As you can tell, in a short span of 2 hours, I have now become an expert in ‘snowboards for beginners’, and if you don’t want to suffer more than you should in your first attempt to throw yourself off a mountain face, you might want to catch the next entry for some precious ‘snowy tips’.

Portland!

Before arriving in Portland, I had no idea what there was to see and do in this Oregon city.

I only knew that I had 2 things to look forward to:

(1) Tax-Free Shopping

Oregon is one of 5 sales-tax exempt states in the USA (the others being Alaska, New Hampshire, Delaware and Montana.) Which can only mean one thing - GOOD SHOPPING!!!

And there IS some fabulous shopping indeed, just 20 minutes south of Portland at the Woodburn Company Stores outlet mall, which carries brands like Coach, Calvin Klein, Banana Republic, GAP, etc. The best deal I got was a Banana Republic dress that cost US$16! Coming straight from California which has the highest sales tax in the country (9%), tax-free purchasing was a huge relief and kinder on our budget.

(2) FAMILEEEEEEE!!!!

Well, just one member of the family - my sister! We last met in May when the folks joined us in the US for a holiday. She guest-blogged about Six Flags in Montreal and artery-clogging American food.

Waiting at Portland airport bright and early at 7am

Two interesting things about the sis:

(i) She looks nothing like me. We would make good visual aids for teachers educating kids about Opposites.

Me:
- Dark-skinned
- Ruler-straight hair
- Large eyes
- Double eyelids
- Round face
- Most resembles: Malays, Thais, Indonesians and the hot favourite - Philippinas

Her:
- Fair-skinned
- Curly hair
- Small slanty eyes
- Single eyelids (but they recently doubled, somehow)
- Pointy-chinned
- Most resembles: Japanese

We do have 2 family traits in common though:
- The Nose
- eyebrows that end midway (they have no tail ends)

See for yourself:

With Popeye and Teng Ning, my sis' colleague. My sis and Dan have 1 thing in common - a love for all things chicken. Esp. if they come in buckets of 9 pieces and above.

Our names are rather similar too: Yi Lin, Li Lin. Which made it quite a nightmare in the pre-handphone era when our friends from school would call the house phone to speak to us about school stuff. Countless times, I've retrieved the phone from a parent informing that there's a call for me, and talked for 5 minutes to the girl on the other end of the line, only to find that I've been talking to my sister's classmate (all of 4 years my junior) all the while. The following is a template of a typical "wrong" conversation:

Caller: Hey, what do we have to bring for art class tomorrow?
Me: What art class? There's no art tomorrow.
Caller: Yes there is.
Me: No there isn't.
Caller: YES THERE IS!
Me: NO THERE ISN'T!

*repeat last 2 lines a few more times*

*pregnant pause*

Me: Hang on, did you want to speak to YI Lin or LI Lin?

Uh huh. Confusing.


(ii) She's a Life Coach and arguably the youngest in Asia to be professionally certified by the International Coaching Federation. Which means that she coaches people in making significant breakthroughs and achieving their dreams through powerful living.

And here's what the chicken-guzzler and maniac-driver-of-our-car looks like when at work (click here). Impressive career profile eh.

The girl was in town for a month-long training programme related to her coaching work. After helping her move her luggage into her apartment, we headed to Walmart, bought a blow-up air mattress and crashed in her cozy flat for 3 nights. I didn't mind sleeping on the uncomfortable mattress cos it meant that we could use her washing machine and dryer for free!

A lovely studio apartment in downtown Portland

Our very own loft

While the sis attended classes during the day, Dan and I explored downtown Portland on our own. Portland is reputed to be the most environmentally-friendly city in USA, with green initiatives such as an energy-efficient public transport system in the form of electric trams and buses, green buildings, widespread recycling measures and the most impressive on record - razing down a 6-lane highway running through the city centre and replacing it with a waterfront park.

This used to be a highway

Taking an afternoon stroll along the waterfront. Nice park. Hated the grey wet wintry weather.

Reflections of a pink sunset

Portland has a historical downtown filled with interesting buildings but unfortunately, the constant winter wetness was getting to us, so we stayed indoors most of the time. Our favourite place to hang out at was Powells - a massive book store, with the biggest new and used book collection in the world (more than 1 million books!), which took up an entire street block. Dan spent hours reading entire Star Wars books in the SciFi section, while I hung out with my sis and her friends at Metaphysics. Yeah, sounds incredibly intellectual I know, but I was reading mostly about astrology, horoscopes and what the psychics had to say about my future. They read the truly mind-jolting works by famous authors like Carl Jung and friends.

Queuing to sell our stash of used books. Only managed to sell 1 book, which earned us US$4.95 in store credit. Poooh.

I hear from my sis that the weather in Portland has improved tremendously over the past weeks with the approach of Spring. So look out for our guest blogger's upcoming posts about the fun side of Portland!

Coasting California

Thinking Tall

I measure in at 1.6m. Just barely. If I stretch my neck a little longer, the top of my head may just scrape the 1.6m mark. More often than not, my official height rings in at 1.59m. And on some worrying occasions, 1.58m (but only on the lousy inaccurate height charts.... *ahem*)

Even with the assistance of two nice gentlemen called Charles and Keith, I can barely be seen peeping out from behind a podium. Which is why when making presentations for work, I remind myself to think tall... and to wear my highest heels.

Having returned from a visit to the California redwood forests, I now have a new imagery to help me think tall - I can pretend to tower over my audience like a redwood tree looming over a field of say... shrubs. Haha. Redwoods grow to nearly 112m in height! That's roughly as tall as a 45-storey block of flats at home. It would require 70 girls of my height standing on each others' heads to measure up to this tree.

And if all 70 girls were my age (a nicely rounded 3-o makes for easy calculation), our combined ages would just about match that of the tree. Yeah, a redwood can live to be 2,000 years old.

Cruising through the Avenue of the Giants

The Californian redwood is the tallest tree in the world. But when it comes to girth, it's cousin, the Giant Sequoia, also found in California, wins branches down. The bark of the giant sequoia alone is 80cm thick! The base - 12m in diameter. Age? An astounding 3,200 years at its oldest.

I'm already amazed that giant tortoises can live to be almost 200 years old. Wandering around in the presence of 2,000-year-old beings at the Redwood National Park was rather daunting. In the midst of these ancient giants, I felt seriously small and silly for feeling old at 30.

Both these giants sprout from seeds the size of an oat flake.

Trying to measure up to a redwood. Just slightly wider than Dan's height, this one is already considered skinny, given that redwoods can grow up to 7m in diameter.

Lunch = some kind of sandwich + a Star Wars novel

Reaching across the base of a toppled-over tree

Eureka!

The drive along the Northern Californian coast from San Francisco to Portland, Oregon took a few days. Along the way, we stopped at a small picturesque historical town called Eureka. The name reminded me of my teacher in Secondary 1 - an excitable but klutzy and plump, bespectacled spotty-skinned lady - who loved repeating the story of how Archimedes yelled "Eureka!" in the bath upon formulating his displacement theory. She was particularly enthusiastic about telling us how he ran naked through the streets of Greece. She repeated that part quite a few times. Thus, I now equate "Eureka" with a naked Greek man, and not some scientific discovery. It's not my fault.

As we were strolling along the quiet waterfront, a little old lady approached us. She seemed friendly enough, giving us tips on which beaches and restaurants to visit, but it soon came to light that her main purpose was to evangelize. She handed us pamphlets bearing the testimony of a former-Buddhist-now-Christian. Hmmm, okaaay, but just cos I'm Asian doesn't mean I'm a Buddhist. Sigh, stereotyping at work again. It didn't help that when we said that we were from Singapore, she brightly piped up (after a long can-hear-crickets-chirping pause), "I've been to Shanghai!" Ordinarily, I would have patiently explained that Singapore is not in China. But after ten months of saying the same old thing, I just couldn't find the enthusiasm to correct her. At least I politely answered the all-time-favourite question, "How come you speak such good English?"

Eureka waterfront

Eye-catching mural

We were particularly excited by the presence of a couple of two used-books stores in Eureka as we were hoping to sell or trade in our stash of read novels. Unfortunately, we only managed to sell one book at the first store and the staff at the second store took one look at what we had to offer - and rejected us, claiming that they wouldn't be able to sell our books. Heyyy, it's not like we read trash, you know. After all, Lovely Bones had been just made into a movie recently and Star War enjoys never-dying popularity through the ages right? Gee, picky picky, some people.

Rejected...

... but not too dejected to enjoy a yummy sandwich and good coffee in a cosy corner

I Felt The Earth Move Under My Feet

After leaving Eureka, we drove to Trinidad beach, just 10 minutes away.

The path down to the beach

Along the way, we passed a number of signs carrying tsunami warnings. Although earthquakes in California can be expected, given that the Pacific Ring of Fire hugs the entire Californian coastline, it was hard to believe that this peaceful beach could be a tsunami hazard area.

Mystical Magical

Far away from glamourous Hollywood, vibrant San Francisco and San Diego Seaworld, this is California's quieter, mysterious side.

A sheet of water covers the beach

A cold but beautiful day for the beach

California as you've never seen it

No bikini hotbods here, but beautiful nonetheless

We busied ourselves with photographing a persistent seagull tugging at the tough rubbery remains of an octopus that had washed up on shore. It honestly didn't look terribly appetising, not quite the likes of Ken Ken Cuttlefish. But it was fun to watch (when you're traveling on a tight budget for months at a stretch, your idea of fun changes alot...)

I think octopi taste better as tako pachi...

All of the sudden, the octopus carcass started swaying violently. And so did the bird. And so did the entire beach! I felt my wide-eyed gaze sweep across the sands to meet that of a local walking along the beach. He nodded gravely and mouthed the word I was dreading - earthquake. Another word flashed across my mind - tsunami....

We should have retreated to higher ground immediately. We should have run for our lives. Instead, we continued to quickly snap a few more shots of the dead octopus... WHAT WERE WE THINKING?!?!?! Yeah, I kept a keen eye out for 30m-high walls of water speeding towards us at 80km/h.... but WHAT WERE WE THINKING?!?!

Common sense (and paranoia) finally prevailed and we hurried (practically ran) up the bank, slammed the car doors after us and sped to safety along higher ground. Thankfully, we didn't see any images of giant waves bearing down on us in our rear-view mirror. We only learned later that the town of Eureka was badly hit by the 6.5-strong earthquake. No one was hurt but traffic lights collapsed, power was cut and items displayed for sale in stores were broken to bits. And to think that we had just left Eureka before the quake hit the town...

Stopping to stretch our legs and catch sunset after speeding away from the quake

Hanging out with the tallest trees in the world and wetting our feet on the eerily beautiful beaches made Northern California quite an unforgettable destination. I'm glad we made the trip up north. It was, literally, a moving experience.

Hmmm, that could be a signboard warning about tsunamis... time to get back into the car and move off!