Hipsters. Effword hipsters. Portland is a hipster hotbed.
What is a hipster? It’s one of those dudes (or girls) who cares more about his appearance than contributing anything valuable to society. They shop at Urban Outfitters, wear clothes just a little too tightly, have giant tattoo sleeves on their arms and wear the dumbest hats imaginable. It used to be trucker hats. Those are now passé to the hipster. Now it’s eighties painters hats or tiny brimmed biking hats.
Their shoes are becoming almost exclusively royal or navy blue canvas, with no sort of sole on them (even some folks in my old office wore them, betraying their ‘productive member of society’ guise). They are the dumbest shoes I can think of.
The older the bike they ride (because cars are for people with jobs), the better. These people ride their bikes all of the time, but they ride the least efficient ones possible. Hey guys, bikes from the seventies aren’t good bikes. Bicycle technology has come a long way since then, put down your moustache comb and learn all about it.
Speaking of moustache combs, their facial hair is preposterous. Handles bars, mutton chops, etc. They looks like idiots. The worst part of the facial hair? It’s grown ironically. These folks do things ironically. You know what would be ironic? How about going to college and getting a job that isn’t in a corner cafe? Or maybe go to a technical school and learn a skill instead of living thirteen to an apartment?
Idiots.
At least homeless veterans were once in the military and drew a paycheck. Ugh.
I really have a distaste for hipsters.
Now that I’ve told you all about hipsters and how badly they live, I’ll tell you about where they live: Portland, Oregon. Portland is super duper extra mega uber super (again) weird. Here’s our adventure in the land of the effword hipster:
We drove into Portland with some time to kill, as Amanda's non-hipster friend Jocelyn was working until later in the evening. We hadn’t had lunch and wanted to go to Voodoo Doughnuts at some point during our visit, so we decided to eat doughnuts for lunch. Healthy? No. Smart? Debatable. Delicious? Mostly.
We parked nearby and headed in:
Inside was super cramped and kind of hipstery (surprise!):
On the walls however, was a sign, or rather a few printouts, that told everyone their stance on vagrants:
I’m with them. Vagrants are the worst.
*Aside* – Portland, and so far, the Northwest, was crawling with drifters. Tons of seemingly homeless later teens/twenty-somethings with enormous backpacks and drug habits. I hate to admit it, since I don’t like hipsters at all, but drifters with drub problems are the worst. The Northwest seems to be OK with them. *Aside over*
We ordered a half dozen doughnuts, plus some milk and headed outside to eat some lunch:
You may be familiar with Voodoo Doughnuts, since the shop has been featured on TV a few different times. If you are not familiar, it’s a doughnut shop that makes strange doughnuts. We ordered five strange doughnuts (and one boring one):
A cake doughnut with vanilla icing and Captain Crunch with Crunchberries and a chocolate doughnut with chocolate icing and Cocoa Puffs.
A raised doughnut with chocolate incing, Rice Crispies and peanut butter sauce, a plain boring lame glazed doughnut, a Maple Bar with actual bacon on top of it, and a jelly doughnut in the shape of an unhappy person with chocolate icing and a pretzel stabbing it.
Amanda and I dug into the assortment and here’s the aftermath:
The best one, as far as I could tell, was the Crunch Berries one. All of the doughnuts were really high quality, and the icings were great as well. I was most looking forward to the Cocoa Puffs one, but that was a slight disappointment. The taste was good, but the Cocoa Puffs were stale.
The worst one? The Maple Bacon Bar. It was foul. How anyone can eat that disgusting mixture of doughnut and maple icing is beyond me. I love bacon in most applications, but that was terrible. Shame on them.
Afterwards, we headed to the doctor for some diabetes tests, Amanda tried not to throw up from being sick with sugar, and I basked in my gluttonous lunch. It was sterling. With the one mentioned exception, all of the doughnuts were great ones.
To burn off some of the sugar, not to mention kill some time, Amanda and I walked around a bit and headed to Powell Books, which is billed as the largest new and used book store in the world. One the trip, I snapped a couple of pictures of things that interested me:
Let’s see. I want to run a lunch truck, but I don’t want to offer anything that might make me cook something and I hate to sweat. What should I do? Oh, I know. I’ll sell cigarettes. Perfect.
I have wondered for years what happened to the actor that scared Kevin MacCallister in Home Alone. I thought that an actor was brought in to play the part, but apparently they found an actual guy that pushed around garbage cans to do it. Instead of cans full of salt (like in the movie), he works for the city of Portland pushing around cans of garbage. I wonder if he has foiled any burglaries in real life?
We made it to the book store, while dodging homeless people who wanted to accost us, and headed inside:
It was actually quite big. Three or four floors of books everywhere. Impressive.
After that, we hopped into the car and met up with Jocelyn for some dinner. We walked to Chiana Mai, which is a semi-nearby Thai food restaurant. i got some Roti for an appetizer (sorry Chiana Mai, but Penang in Philly crushes you on the Roti front):
The Roti itself (the bready part) was a little soggy and thick for my liking, but the filling (chicken and potato curry) was delicious.
For dinner, I got some chicken curry:
It was pretty good, with the exception of the crazy amount of coconut milk they dumped on it to garnish it. It was a little much. I ate around it as best I could,m and when I got a normal amount, the food was very good. A little spicy with plenty of curry.
After dinner, we headed back to Jocelyn’s apartment, met her boyfriend Matt for the second time and watched some television until bed time. bed time was pretty terrible, as the couch that I was on was just about the least comfortable thing I can imagine. it left me longing for the child’s bed I slept in when we were in New Jersey. No matter, in the morning, we were getting breakfast. Humungous breakfast.
Amanda had been looking forward to breakfast in Portland the entire time. It may have been her inspiration for the road trip itself. She had her sights set on the Stepping Stone Cafe.
We got there, headed in and ordered. After the usual wait, our food came:
We both ordered the same thing, with the exception of breakfast meats. I got super thick bacon and Amanda got the sausage patties. The breakfast was OK. The bacon was very good, but the rest of it was just meh.
Oh.
And of course we each got the Stepping Stone Cafe’s specialty: Man-Cakes:
Despite what it looks like (dainty and hairless), that is not a little girl’s hand. It is my hand. I am an adult male who has grown to be six feet and six inches tall. That pancake is huge. larger than the plate in fact. A regular plate, not a tiny one.
I got the buttermilk and Amanda got the special: pumpkin.
The quality of it surprised me, as I figured a pancake that thick (about an inch-and-a-half in the center) would most certainly dry out when cooked, but it was pretty moist, even without syrup.
Also, I am not a pancake fellow, but it was pretty delicious as pancakes go. Well done Stepping Stone Cafe.
I ended up finishing about three quarters of the Man-Cake and three quarters of the regular side-breakfast. I was stuffed and ended up feeling a litte (lot) sick to my stomach.
Amanda, however, decimated breakfast:
At this point, she started to slow down a bit and called it quits.
Minutes later, she started picking at her plates. A few minutes thereafter, she was still picking at it, one little bite at a time, until finally:
The last bite or the Man-Cake. She crushed it. Killed it. Etc. She ate the whole damned thing.
She now weighs one hundred and seventy three pounds.
No she doesn’t.
After that personal record setting performance, we walked (Amanda probably could have sprinted) around the neighborhood a bit and ended up in the local skate shop (our skateboards were stolen a few months ago):
We had two complete boards set up, got some free stickers and headed back to Jocelyn’s for some homemade pizza and TV. We had a super long drive waiting for us in the morning, so we slept as much as we could on that couch (none sleep) and dreamt of Nevada, our next stop:
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