Apparently our foot massage in Chinatown last night was more relaxing than we thought as neither of us woke up on east coast time today! After a casual breakfast in the hotel lounge, we headed over to the Saturday Market.
The Saturday Market has lots of great local vendors selling their wares. We learned from one of the vendors that all products from Naito Street to the fountain must be made by hand. There are a lot of talented folks in Portland.
Tattoos and piercings are definitely synonymous with Portland from what we can see. So, when in Rome (or Portland)...
This will come as a surprise to no one but they are henna so in about two weeks they'll be gone. Oh and while we like to do as the locals do, we did refrain from any piercings!
A short walk from the Saturday Market is Voodoo Doughnuts...of course we had to stop for a little fuel after the morning walk. We got lucky as normally the line is long and folks wait for an hour or more...we only had to wait for 10 minutes which was just enough time to figure out which doughnut we'd pick. We picked the Dirty Old Bastard...chocolate glaze, Oreo cookies and peanut butter drizzle.
Portland is definitely a "unique" place...some might say "weird". Well Portlandians embrace their inner weird and even advocate keeping it weird as evident by this building artwork.
Oh and of course Darth Vader on the unicyle promotes Portland's weirdness on many levels!
Another short walk and we found ourselves at Powell's Books. A must stop for anyone who loves to read or appreciates seeing the world's largest independent books store...over 1.5 million books. I could easily spend a week in their travel section alone! One the top floor tucked away in a corner and requiring special access is their Rare Books Room. Definitely worth a peek...we saw a two book collection on Lewis and Clark's Expedition for a mere $25,000! After picking up a few books, we headed back to the hotel to drop off our day's purchases before heading to our next stop.
Over the river and through the woods is the Pittock Mansion. Built by Henry Pittock, owner and publisher of The Weekly Oregonian newspaper, and his wife, Georgiana, this 22 room mansion (almost castle-like) was outfitted with all the modern conveniences and had amazing views. The Pittocks were one of Portland's founding families. Henry also made his fortune in real estate, mining, banking, steamboats, ranching and paper. Georgiana was a philanthropist and started many organizations such as the Ladies Relief Society, Women's Union and the Martha Washington Home.
After our tour of the mansion, it occurred to us that other than the light breakfast at the hotel, the only other food we had eaten all day was a French macaron at the Saturday Market and the doughnut from Voodoo. We headed over to Killer Burgers for what is perhaps the best burger I've ever had before heading to Rose Petal for a much more relaxing foot massage in a by far less scary location as we were in Pioneer Place. All burgers at Killer Burgers come with bacon because everything is better with bacon. At Rose Petal, we opted for a 30 minute chair massage followed by a 30 minute foot massage and as a bonus, my therapist, Joey, told us about a cool coffee house offering dessert and live music.
So off to Rimsky-Korsakoffee House we went (no website so just google it). The coffee house is set in an old Victorian house and only a lighted "open" sign let us know it was the right spot. Rimsky's has live entertainment every night by unpaid musicians so tip well. This evening's entertainment was provided by Diane the Waltz Lady. The dessert was AMAZING. I had the chocolate pot de creme and Julie had the ginger cake with vanilla ice cream and caramel sauce. Supposedly the house is haunted but the spirits didn't appear to us this evening. Definitely make sure you head up the stairs to check out the restroom...has to be experienced. The perfect end to a great day...now time for bed as we are going to wine country tomorrow!
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