South Waterfront Ops

Some time ago after work, I decided to take the street car home instead of the usual bus ride. When I got to the street car, I noticed right away that there were at least a hundred people surrounding the street car. I looked around puzzled and came to realize that there was a tv show shooting on the street car. The tv show was Grimm which I have never heard of. Anyways, it was pretty cool to see them work, but took me half an hour to get to the closes street car stop.

PNCA Display

I love the Fall PNCA design display at the Galleria.  Located in Yamhill and 11th.  Check it out.

Italian Festival

Later after hitting up a food cart pod at the Alder location, we stopped by Pioneer Square where they were having the Italian Festival.  The last time I was the festival, it was 11:30 at night and there were hundreds of people dancing to classic Italian live music.  So we got here this time before the madness broke out.  At this time before the main events took place, people just gathered in the square to eat good traditional dishes and desserts.  

Alder Food Cart Pod

My wife and I had a chance to go visit the Alder Food Cart Pod in downtown Portland with a good friend.  It's a Friday night and the weather is warm, not too hot and there is a light breeze.  When we got there, we were starving so everything looked good.  The bad thing was this pod is one of the biggest community of food carts in Portland, so picking a place was hectic.  

 My friend Cath got this Hong Kong style chicken with rice.

My wife got this pad thai for $5 and the portion was huge.  Plus it was really spicy also which I like very much.

At that time I was craving Middle Eastern/Mediterranean food so I got this beef gyro which was ok.  I've had better and bigger gyros for the same price.

As I was eating my gyro, I looked up and saw El Rodeo starring at me. Whoa.

After we finished our food, we got bubble tea from Easy Day.  They were pretty good.

While waiting for our bubble tea drinks to come out, I saw this kid eating like a true Portlander, right under a tree on the street. Nice.

I had to take a picture of this sign.  It's awesome.

Community Corner

There are many neighborhoods in Portland that are pretty well hidden from the average Portlander because traffic is low and the way to these places get very confusing really fast, but what you find are these tight knit communities where most of the neighbors know each other.  Not the "know each other" like saying hi only when passing by, but they actually hang out with each other.  Some neighbors plant vegetables together in the community garden, some have scheduled afternoon get-togethers, and some hang out in the community corner to talk or to take a break and read a book.  I've seen a couple of these community corners before in SE Portland and I've recently stumbled upon this one in SW Portland.  I'll never reveal the exact location of these corners because they should only belong to those neighbors that built it.  Last, I love the little details like the decorations the neighbors leave in this corner.  It's pretty cool.

Meow.

I love these kinds of places. 

After Hours

Once in a while I come home from work very late at night and usually end up taking some pictures around Pioneer Square in downtown Portland while waiting for the Max light rail to arrive.   Downtown Portland is actually a very nice place to walk around in at night, it's a one time thing everyone should do if you ever visit Portland. 

Finally the Max arrives.