Street fairs and markets

26 July 2008 (Saturday) Still in Portland - hot and sunny.

In the morning there is a street fair and we wander up and down looking at the stalls. The community is quite active and there are bands and lots of stalls about the environment, not wasting water, politics, artwork and such. One thing of note was a band that was playing really neat music with a xylophone being one of the main sounds. I bought a hat from one of the stalls because I needed one for walking around in the sun all the time. It's floppy, lime green with brown spots on it. I was assured that it looks cute but I think it might take me a little bit longer to get used to it. At least it keeps my nose in the shade.

We headed back home for lunch (and to change into cooler clothes as it was really warming up outside) and had left over thai.

Then we headed out to the Saturday markets with all kinds of crafts, artwork, tshirts, dresses and also inmported goods. I can't possibly describe this, there were just too many stalls with so many things on them. It seemed like there were a hundred, all in rows, spaced quite closely together with little alleys in between and people moving all the time. I wasn't really carrying enough cash to buy many things but so much of it was really cool.

I had a 'elephants ear' which is a big flat pastry/bread thing covered in cinnamon sugar. I'm not sure if they are unique to this region (Pacific North-west) or if they are at fairs/markets everywhere in the states, but they are traditional and taste good. Then again, everything fried and covered with sugar seems to taste pretty good to me.

Once we tired of the markets we went to Powells - a gigantic second hand bookstore. It takes up an entire city block and goes up 4 floors. It's like a library when you go in there, rows and rows of huge shelves, you can use a computer to look up the catalogue. It's divided into colour rooms - blue room, gold room, rose room - and the different genres are spread between them. You can sell old books to them, and when you find the book you want on the shelf, there are often multiple copies there in different states with different price tags on them. So you can decide if you want a newer, more expensive book, or pay less and get an older copy.

In Portland there was a family called the McMenanons who had money and bought old building to restore and turn into micro-breweries (that's the Irish for you, I guess). We went to the Kennedy School for dinner, which is one of these buildings. It used to be an elementary (primary) school that was closed down because it was going to cost US$500,000 to repair. The family bought it, hired local craftspeople to restore and paint artworks inside and have opened it up with restaurants, a movie theatre, soaking pools and there are even hotel rooms you can stay in.

I had a calzone, which is dough that is filled with stuff, rolled up and then baked. Mine had chicken, pesto, feta and garlic. It was pretty good but the garlic was a bit overpowering for me. We also had tater tots which are like hashbrowns about the size of the first joint of your thumb - little cylinders. I had a 'handcrafted root beer' that reminded me a lot of the golden circle brand sarsparilla we get in NZ.

For dessert I had half a molten lava cake with vanilla icecream. The cake was like a little chocolate pudding that wasn't fully cooked, so some of the inside was all gooey and runny. Mmmm... The raspberry sauce was also made with their Ruby raspberry flavoured beer, which we had a jog of to share. Mmmm raspberry beer. So good. Food so good, so filling. I took half of my calzone home in a box but haven't eaten it yet (two days later) because those chunks of garlic really scared me off.

There was an 'art bike' outside - a motorbike covered with so much stuff I can't describe it. Everyone else was standing around and looking at it and taking pictures so I need to remember to get copies of those so I can upload them at some point.

We were going to go to a club with some music afterwards but it was no good so we went home and soaked in the hot tub for a while before finally flaking out at the end of our long day!