Portland Things To Do: A question to PDXers

Initial question: This past week we had friends in from out of town and found ourself in the familiar situation: where to take these people in PDX to show them around all the wonders Portland has to offer. I’d love to hear your ideas about this question. Where do you take people in portland when they come to visit? Please answer in the comments if you can.

My Week…

My friend @jaethan and his wife Faith were in town this week for an entire 6 days from the interior of BC, Canada. There were too many awesome things to recount all of it in detail, so here’s a hit list…

Jae and Faith were in town, so there’s that.

My son, Aiden, cruised around everywhere with us, which was bittersweet. He was pretty great all weekend. And It helped a ton that Faith was so great with him.

The US mens national soccer team topped their initial group, qualifying for the next round, and subsequently lost their game. It was harsh. Probably the harshest experience I’ve had with soccer. And it’s not like I thought we’d win the fu&king world cup or anything… but it was still hard to be eliminated after such a fight in this tourney.

@zach_aren, @mellisa_reeves and myself all got the new iPhone 4. Zach and I were up early to hang in line on thursday… Mellisa went in later and had to wait in line for almost 6 hours… so sucky. The irony is that she’s totally not a techy; I mean, Zach and I we’re giddy with excitement to get the phone. When Mellisa got it she was, like, “this thing sucks. What is this?” She just needed a new phone so damn bad that she had to get it early or wait till they were back in stock.

We searched around town for the best burger… Tried Serrato’s, Echo, and Saphire Hotel (Slow Bar is another one we heard about, but they hate kids). Saphire won; and they have Chimay on tap, so there’s that. (Dear portland, any insight on where the best burger is?)

We did an intensive, PDX-wide espresso tasting tour. Notable hits were Barista on Alberta and Coffee House Northwest’s new project, Sterling Coffee Roasters on NW 21st. My poor liver and brains were way overworked on my day off.

We got to see Josh Ritter play at Wonder Ballroom. This was WAY better than I could have expected. As my wife put it, Ritter was like a mix between a retarded person and a clown… He just couldn’t stop smiling and bouncing, which made instant fans of everyone everywhere in that room. His band was amazing. The performance was top notch. The songs were works of art. Only draw back is that he didn’t play Girl In The War. #nexttime.

After Josh Ritter we went up to Secret Society lounge and had some Corpse Revivers, a gin & absinth cocktail… aptly named.

Jae, Faith, Mellisa, Zach and I had a long, semi-violent, sincere and deep conversation about “the framework:” what we believe to be true about life, our deepest philosophy and/or spirituality. Jae is a profoundly mental guy who’s rigorous philosophical necessity forced us all into thoughtfulness and wild hypothetical situation role playing. We didn’t decide much, and mostly fought due to misunderstanding about what each other’s terms meant, but it was really, really good. I’m grateful to have friends who can have, who need to have, conversations like this.

Finally, we had an Enneagram party: like, I printed out worksheets and poured some wine and we hung out on the deck going through the Enneagram assessment test. It took about 40 minutes, resulting in each of us calling each other by our numbers, instead of our names. Now i’m just Social Seven to Jae, and he’s Fu&king Five to me! lol. It was a good time figuring where friends land on this… interesting to read about the other types and see just how very different they are from myself.

Slideshow…

A bunch of great pics over at the flickrs… check them out: watch the slideshow →

So, let me know what you do in PDX when you’ve got friends in town. What restaurants, bars, night life spots, natures, etc?