Our last morning in Portland, Wednesday 6/6 (Svenska flaggans dag!), Leslie made us a heavenly breakfast with omelette, fruit and berries. She is such a sweetheart.

Then, she drove us in to the car rental office and made sure we got all our old and new stuff into our grey Toyota Camry.

Overall, I enjoyed Portland. Maybe mostly thanks to Leslie. It is a pretty and cosy city, well worth the visit. Even despite the rain.

Leslie has a friend called Justin. Justin is a bartender. He works at a bar where they make very special coctails. Of course we had to go and try them.

Hanna had a lime-cilantro-chili thing. She loved it. As for me, I took the avocado daquiri. Thick, almost like a smoothie, and delicious. I don’t generally drink alcohol, but I’m always up for a good coctail.

On Tuesday afternoon (5/6), Leslie took us to her favourite shopping street in southeastern Portland. And we got so well started in Seattle, Hanna and me, so why stop? Oregon doesn’t even have sales tax, shopping there is “super cheap”. So, well, I bought even more stuff.

There’s something with the logic “I’m only here now, I have to take the chance when I get it”. It just makes me go for it. I don’t even like shopping, not at home atleast. America has changed my personality completely.

My new acquisitions in Portland include a purse, magnets and a beautiful pair of red shoes.

That night, before going out and having a drink, we dressed up in our finest. Here I am, posing in my dress from Vancouver, belt from Edmonton, earrings from Seattle and shoes from Portland. The pretty tights I borrowed from Leslie.

Hanna is in an animal print phase. Beatiful, as always.

The one big tourist attraction in Portland is the International Rose Test Garden, a meticulously manicured garden of over 500 different rose varieties. Hanna and I went there on a rainy Monday (4/6) morning, but I was soon so intoxicated by the smells and the beauty of the raindrops on the rose petals that I neither felt the chill nor heard Hanna’s careful suggestions of “mightn’t we go into town soon?”. My camera had reached seventh heaven.

Portland’s inofficial slogan is “Keep Portland wierd”. And you certainly meet a lot of wierd people in Portland. But also a lot of young, hip people on bikes, recycling bins and food trucks.

Pioneer Courthouse Square, the red brick central square.

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Food trucks. We had delicious Vietnamese.

The big bookstore in town, Powell’s Books, had beatiful pillars and an excellent map section.

And oh yeah, Portland is also the city of strip clubs. For some wierd reason. They are everywhere.

Naturally, because the Willamette River runs through the middle of Portland, there are many bridges here. This beautiful red one, for example.

Apparently, Portland is the most bicyclist dense city in the States. Five percent of Portlanders bike to work. I find that very sympathetic.

It is also very green, and feels small. Nowhere do you really get that city feeling. It feels more like a small town, with cosy small neighbourhoods and trees and flowers everywhere. It’s a nice place, laid back and unjudging. Open and small-scale.

Sunday evening (3/6), Hanna and I left Seattle and headed to Portland by Greyhound. At the bus station, we were picked up by Leslie. Wonderful Leslie.

Back in 2009, when I was discovering Bolivia together with Natalia, Jonna and Cecilia, we happened to stay at the same hostel in Rurrenabaque as this American girl and Dutch guy. Leslie and Sven. Rurrenabaque is the last outpost in the Bolivian Amazon before the jungle starts, and it was hot and extremely humid. So after just a ten minute chat with Sven and Leslie, we decided to go down to the river for a swim. We ended up spending a week together in Rurre, going on boat tours, visiting markets and cooking with all the amazing vegetables we bought. We had such a blast, buying second-hand clothes and going to bars dressed all crazy.

So when I decided to go through Oregon on my North America trip, I naturally thought of Leslie and used Facebook for the only thing I feel really comfortable using Facebook for: keeping in contact with the friends I’ve made during my travels. I asked her about Portland, and she invited me and Hanna to stay on her couch.

And once we arrived, she did so much more. She drove us around town, showing us all the coolest places, especially the best shopping spots. She took us to the best restaurants and bars and on the last morning, made us an amazing breakfast and made sure that we got to the car rental office. Both Hanna and I fell in love with her generosity, her cute little apartment and charming cat. We couldn’t have had a better guide to the wierd city of Portland.

Me, Hanna and Leslie, shopping in southeastern Portland.

Hanna outside Leslies cool brick apartment building in northeastern Portland.

Leslies cat felt he was so much more important than the plans for our roadtrip, so he just came and laid down on top of the Oregon map.

An old-school photobooth photo that the three of us took. It didn’t turn out very good, though, the booth became far too crowded. But it was fun.

Before I left home, people were telling me how much I would love Vancouver. And I did. What they didn’t prepare me for, though, was the wonders of Seattle. During my four days there, I developed a dead serious crush on this city of rain, libraries and art in the streets. It’s an amazing place, and I think everyone should go. Like, RIGHT NOW.

In highschool, I was the ultimate music nerd. I read magazines and blogs, searched the internet, used several of those create-my-own-radio-station-sites that were popular before Spotify came and wiped out all the competition. I borrowed CDs from the library, especially the mixes in the series Sonically Speaking, that came with every number of a Swedish music magazine. The feeling when I discovered a new band, especially if it was one that non of my friends knew about, was so great. I felt like an eighteen century explorer in the middle of the Amazon.

And I made mix CDs. I would hear a song, it would make me think of someone and suddenly I was composing a mix around that, with songs for that special someone. I put a lot of thought into those mixes, both the songs and the order of the songs. The lyrics of a song shouldn’t contradict the lyrics of the next, and the end of a song had to sound good when switched over into the intro of the next. I made it into a science. And the covers too, small pieces of art. I really spent a lot of time on my mix CDs.

In the end, I don’t know if all the people I gave or sent the mixes to ever listened to them. But Natalia always used to put one of my CDs on when I came to visit, some of best memories I have from Kirke’s apartment are accompanied by the mixtapes I gave her, and I’m so proud of having introduced Moto Boy to Sofie. Later, we even went to his concert together.

But then university happened and I slowly stopped doing things that I’d previously loved. Like the music. I just didn’t have the time. And energy. Being a music nerd is time consuming and exhausting. In the last two or so years, I haven’t discovered one single great new band. I think. I have only listened to my old stuff. Or the new stuff by my old favourites. Or the Swedish Public Radio.

Staying with Miles, though, inspired me. Not only was his studio apartment full of cool paintings and old cameras and other intriguing stuff, but his CD collection was huge. Really, immense. And talking with him about music, all the Swedish bands that he likes and realising how much we have in common (he just knew so much more), made me feel that I have to start nerding again. Because, there are few things that can beat good music. Hearing a really good song for the first time is like meeting god. I need that in my life, I can’t be all about science (even though geography might just be the love of my life).

And then, one night, Miles invited me to a concert with his band. It was at this small bar in Fremont, just opened and kind of deserted – but it didn’t matter. They were great anyway. The Torn ACLs. Later, Miles gave me two of their albums, and I made Hanna listen to them over and over, all through Oregon and California. They became the soundtrack of our roadtrip, together with “San Francisco” with Hello Saferide, of course.

Seeing The Torn ACLs play, didn’t only give me a new great band to listen to, but also reminded me about how fun it is to not only listen to music, but create it too. Singing has become a need for me. I don’t think I can stay healthy without it. I tried last fall, but there was just something missing. I’ve got to find a choir when I come back home. Or convince some of my musically talanted friends that I’m a good enough singer to help with the chorus and tamburine sometimes. Every band needs a girl in a cute dress playing the tamburine, that’s a universally acknowledged truth. And I sure do have many cute dresses.

I have many things to thank Miles for. But I think that this awakening is the most important. This my second musical dawn. My musical renaissance.

So, I know that in some cases, it can be hard to distinguish between architecture and art. Especially in a city like Seattle which is so full of inbetween things of an aestethically appealing nature. But I’ve just simply had to make a choice. Here is some of the art of Seattle:

Pioneer Square:

(Does it say really ‘UNDERBAR’, or am I just seeing things?)

Downtown, by Pike Place Market:

(Yes, it’s an entire wall covered in chewing gum.)

Belltown:

Capitol Hill:

In Volunteer Park:

University of Washington:

And then, finally, Fremont:

(Yes, it’s a huge statue of Lenin, shipped over from Slovakia, where it was found in a scrap yard sometime after 1990. If it hadn’t been found, it would probably have been turned into iron pellets. It’s so much cooler as it is, standing in the middle of Fremont, Seattle, the United States of America. The epitome of ironic art.)

Miles and Hanna, with the artsy streetlamps and benches of Fremont.

Monday 2/7: I’m sitting on my really robust, country house bed in the room that I share with Sandra from Spain. Listening to Sandra sing out of tune with her iPhone, in Spanish, while she’s dancing so that the concrete under her feet echoes outside the window. I can still feel the taste of blueberries in my mouth. When I’m done with this, I might just go outside in the sun, pick a few strawberries on the way to the pond, where I’ll take a swim and then lie in the sun and read the last, momentous part of “Anna Karenina” (no, I haven’t finished it yet. It’s embarrassing, I know).

Tonight, Lorri, the farmer, has promised to teach me how to make American chocolate pudding from scratch. (Isn’t it funny, that Lori of Whiskey Creek Farm and Lorri of Duckworth Farm have almost the same name? There must be something special with those Lor(r)ies.)

This is the 200th chapter about my trip. I’ve been traveling for 117 days. I have 29 days left. Part of me doesn’t feel ready to go home quite yet, while another can’t wait to get back and start studying again. I’ve learned so much. I feel like someone else. It’ll be interesting to see how long that lasts.