August 19, 2008

• Things to do while I am here…orGone

  
  The two main things everyone tells me I have to do while I am out in eugene is go hiking and visit the coast. So last weekend, i opted to go hiking at Silver Falls, about 1 hour northeast of eugene. I went on the 8 mile trail of ten falls hike, and all in all had a fairly pleasant day
  Now there is something you dont see everyday…the backside of water!
  

  Next day I drove 2 hours north to Portland. Which is only slightly more of a city than Eugene, but it was enough to remind me why I love cities. Strangely, the day I went up happened to be the Indian festival
  
  On texting this knowledge to my indian friends, One warned me that it was also an indian holiday celebrating the brother sister relationship, and I should be careful not to let any girl tie a string around my wrist because that would symbolically make her my sister and then I “cant bang her. Also, you have to give her money”

  Which was weird, because usually its the other way around where money must be exchanged prior to banging

  Anyone watch arrested development? Remember where buster gets his hand bitten off by a seal? I also have a traumatic seal biting related story and this statue was almost as frightening to me as a clown would be…luckily i am slowly overcoming my terror of the ocean
   
  Next on the agenda was a walking tour of Portland
  
  During which I learned some of the following things

  Any building in Portland designated as “historic” means it was built of cast iron, and is therefore magnetic. This means you can go around chucking little magnetic frogs in oldtown to see which buildings really are old.

  Oregon has some of the most liberal free speech laws due to some guy who ran a bookstore that carried only radical literature. This meant his store was a common place for riots to be started, which he consistently got arrested for despite not starting or participating in any protests…he won every time, so the free speech laws are well set down, and smut peddlers and people from the weirder side are free to act however they please
  
  Back in the day, oregon was apparently corrupt as all get out, and also had one of the largest industries for both bootlegging and shanghaing. Apparently, the correct terminology for shanghai is crimping. Both which mean the act of drafting someone onto a sailing ship against their will, usually because they are drunk or otherwise unconscious when they are loaded onto the boat.

  The way this industry worked was when a ship docked, crimps would immediately try and convince all the sailors to stay at their hotels, where prices would be cheap, food would be plentiful, and women would be…generous. The goal was to make the sailors want to stay in portland. Then when the time came to ship out, not all the sailors would show up and in order to fill the amount needed to crew the ship, the captain would have a quiet word with the crimp who would then troll the bars and alleys to procure able bodied men to fill the places left. The crimp would return with the required number of men, he would be paid by the captain for each one and the captain would sail away with no one the wiser until the men woke up and realized that they were now in the navy…

  Yo fools, crimpin’ aint easy.
  pictured above are some of the tunnels through which crimps would transport drunken farmers out to the docks to be shanghaied. These tunnels also connected many buildings so patrons of speakeasies could make a quick escape to another building if a raid went down
  
  Man this girl is so hardcore she is begging with a fauxhawk and a HARP
  Here at the Voodoo donut shop and wedding chapel (no kidding) they specialize in voodoo donuts…with pretzel pins…and raspberry blood filling. A delicious way to get revenge
  
  Among their other unique donut creations are the Maple Bacon Donut
  
  And the Tang Donut…which tastes exactly like you think it would
  

  Some other fun facts about oregon

  *Matt Groenig, creator of the simpsons, grew up in Portland and based a lot of simpsons episodes on his memories of his childhood. Streets in Portland you may recognize include Lovejoy, Quimby, Evergreen Terrace, and others.

  *Two hours south of portland was the former springfield power plant, located next to the willamette river (blinky, anyone?)

  *Portland was originally conceived as a get rich quick scheme to create a trading post/city in between Oregon City, the end of the oregon trail, and the nearest trading post, 18 miles downriver…the journey between the two would make a brief stop halfway at a clearing to have lunch. That clearing became portland. Blocks are short in portland because more blocks means more corner and waterfront properties which you can charge more money for. Around the border of the entire city are all the parks because back in the day, rich people liked to take their carriages around the park-so build parks and rich people will come. Most of early portland was designed to scam people out of money one way or another

  *Until about 1940, Portland was the second largest KKK state. Portland has a terrible history of racism, evicting its Japanese americans 6 months before the first internment camps were built, putting up white only business signs when a flood wiped out the nearby largely black ship building city, and multiple others. Which i guess answers my question of why by and large i have only seen white people in Oregon…not a great track record with minorities

  *Chinatown in portland, at last census, had 6 people of asian descent living there. The owner of the chinese drugstore is Persian.

  *Portland was so corrupt it was almost Vegas, but bugsy siegel hated the rain and so built his hotel/casino in a drier climate, Nevada, instead.

  That concludes what I learned this weekend…what about you?

  • 11:54 pm
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