A bunch of us from work went for a short trip down to Portland a couple weeks ago and spent an evening in Seattle on the way back. Paul Cheng took this shot of me at the SPL while I was taking this picture with my cellphone. Thanks Paul, great shot. People don’t usually get this kind of photo taken of themselves, unsolicited and unsuspecting. A nice surprise. Kind of Izaz Rony-esque. (He’s the guy that you call to photograph you without you knowing.)

Portland was pleasant & enjoyable. An easy city: easy to get around, easy to find your way around, and easy to be around. I spent a couple hours on 23rd Avenue, a walking, shopping, lounging street, which at first glance reminds me of a gentrified and much cleaner version of Vancouver’s Commercial Dr, scale-wise. It’s got a mix of building types: traditional houses with generous porches converted into retail and some small scale commercial, some older brick apartment buildings, and nothing much over three stories. At night most of the buildings on 23rd are lit by what look to me like white Christmas tree lights, even though the stores are closed. So you get this low level illumination at a fine scale on what would otherwise be a dark street because to my memory there was only one civic light standard per block.

Anyhoo, so I thought I’d take a few minutes with a cappuccino at Mio Gelato, sit outside and take in some Portland as it passed me by. A lot of dog walkers and couples. And there was this young woman on the corner with a clipboard doing some sidewalk canvassing for Greenpeace. She was annoying almost everyone she could as they passed by her. Pretty assertive too, calling out lines from her shallow repertoire, her favourite was, “You guys care about the environment, right?” After ten minutes of sitting there with this going on in front of you, it gets a little tired. But she could change it up for the audience. For example, to a young collegish looking woman, she said, “You’re an independent thinker, right?” And to this african american family (Portland’s not all that racially diverse) that was walking by, she said, “You guys want social change, right?” The answer I read on their faces was, “Maybe, but not the kind that requires talking to you.” She wasn’t having much luck, so she crossed to the opposite corner. In the photo below, that’s her with the red backpack.

(And here’s a shot of Mio Gelato from Google Street View with the lovely white line, white arrows and Google watermark. Street View, great idea: low-res distorted shots of the streets of an entire city! Marred with ugly directional tools! Check out the neighbourhood yourself, here.)

About half an hour earlier I was confronted with a different Greenpeace clipboard kid a few blocks away, who said to me, “Did you know that the air you breathe is being sacrificed to make toilet paper?” Or something like that. Well, frankly at the time I didn’t know who the hell she was or why she was yelping out obscure coded messages to me, so I didn’t engage. Just for reference, I’m very much the guy who does not appreciate being bothered/interrupted/yelped at while out on a stroll. I’m the teflon sidewalk guy.

Later the same day, I was downtown and this gal was standing & walking around on the corner with a skinny binder on her head, you know, like some kind of finishing school exercise. Clever trick: she goes, “Hey, you want to try this?” (She means balancing her binder on my head. Can you imagine?). Well of course she tips her head and lets the binder fall into her hands and what do you know, she’s a canvasser. The binder’s got pictures of people in a third world country on it. And you’re on a mission to find a pair of sneakers because sneaker selection back home in Vancouver is so weak.

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