Byer Family: Portland, OR (Thursday)

Friday, July 20, 2012

Portland, OR (Thursday)

What do we think of when we think of Portland? Well, honestly? We now think of hippies, people with tattoos and a lot of piercings, and homeless people. Portland was interesting. We're glad we went, but it is not our favorite city in the world. We started out our day at the famous Voo Doo Doughnut shop. They serve a variety of bizarre doughnut flavors! We learned during our walking tour (the next event on our schedule) that the company started out serving doughnuts to drunk people with NyQuil, Aspirin, or Pepto Bismol baked into them. Their slogan went something like, "Cure your hangover." The FDA told them that this was VERY illegal, so they had to come up with some other way to bring people into their shop. Hence, now they have a variety of flavors of doughnuts! I got a chocolate peanut butter Oreo doughnut and an M&M doughnut. Patrick got an Oreo doughnut and a chocolate doughnut. Mmm, they were good, and very filling!

Next, we met up with our tour guide for the "Underground Portland" walking tour. We learned a lot about Portland's past corruption. It turns out, Portland wasn't a very nice city to live in long ago. There was crimping/Shanghaiing (kidnapping men and forcing them to work on ships), a lot of prostitution, underground tunnels, and more. The tour guide was very interesting and we learned a lot!

All over Portland, there are a ton of food carts and vendors. It's their thing. We were told that this is what we MUST have for lunch, so that's what we did. After lunch we went to Portland's International Rose Test Garden. It was beautiful, full of a ton of different kinds and colors of roses. It smelled good too! Tomorrow, we are off to Crater Lake (about 5 hours south of Portland in Oregon).