Mark + Heather: Laura is here!

Laura used a "buddy pass" from the airline David works at to come out here and visit Heather and I. Heather has been working all weekend, so it's mostly been me showing Laura around the city. Yesterday I took the max out to the airport to meet her. It started pouring down rain as we headed west on the max. We stopped downtown and ate at Cha! Cha! Cha!, an amazing Mexican restaurant. We also went into Powell's books, Laura seemed really impressed by their huge book selection. It's a really amazing store, a full city block of books. We decided against more adventuring, since we were getting pretty wet and Laura still had her bags with her. When Heather got off work we went out and ate pizza at Extreme Pizza, a west coast chain that has some really awesome specialty pizzas.

Today Laura and I headed into town again. We "climbed" Mt. Tabor, Portland's resident inactive volcano. "Climbed" really just means walked up a whole lot of stairs. The view from the top was stunning, we could see the whole close-in east side, as well as downtown on the other side of the Willamette. The day was way too overcast to see Mt. Hood, but it is visible from the peak of Mt. Tabor when the weather is clear. After descending Mt. Tabor we walked through the Hawthorne district and got some coffee. Then we headed back downtown and saw this crazy performance art play in Pioneer Square. We watched it for a few minutes before a girl came up to us and gave us some information. The play was actually based on the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which made a little more sense than we had thought from first observation. After that we took the streetcar through the Pearl District, doing the full northern loop before getting back on the max and heading back to my apartment. It was a pretty big adventure, and I think Laura got a pretty good feel for the city.