Portland (USA) - grim yet great

A city famous for very little, and with no tourist landmarks, seems an odd place to spend four days. Yet, fond memories have been left by this Oregon treasure. Like its Northwest counterpart, Seattle, it certainly does cool bookshops, real ales, funky clothes shops and live music way better than most cities. Though again, the volume of the homeless was scary.

Having been there only one hour, a random stroll past an art-house cinema revealed that Steven Soderbergh's film 'Che' was showing that night - with the director himself in attendance. A must see, so I bought one of the last tickets and headed back at 7pm. Little did I know that it would be 1am before my cinematic experience ended. Grueling and fascinating, both the film and q&a session. The former purely due to length and the latter thanks to the film student wankers, with their technical questions. Aspect ratio and post production, please?

Three nights of drinking then followed, coupled with attempts to get to the Mount Hood snow area - all of which failed. Highlights included: being pulled over by the cops, pints of Guiness on St. Paddy's night, lesbian anarchic punk rock, drunken boardgames, free stuff courtesy of JD and a flame-juggler stripper night. Seriously. Strippereoke was only missed by one night.

In the midst of all this mayhem, I did cook a feast of Hungarian Goulash for the gang, earning the title: hostel chef. Intellectual rigour was provided by a visit to Powell's city of books. It claims to be the biggest in the world and, whilst I'm not sure about that, it's certainly gigantic and has character which puts Borders et al to shame. Natural stimulation came from a muddy hike around the massive Washington Park. If only I hadn't taken along an annoying yank (most aren't, by the way) who refused to eat off the hostel crockery, as he feared picking up a foreign disease. Ridiculous.