The last real Oregon tourist pirate day
Today will be the last real (as in 24 hour) day for me here in Oregon: land of the progressive and home of the hazelnut, bedrock of the metasequoia glyptostroboides fossils; a fast growing tree in the conifer family Cupressaceae native to the Sichuan-Hubei region of Chin. And you can rightly begin to suspect that something is not all correct when you've been in a region for almost a week and a half yet you resort to shanghai-ing dusty minutiae from the hypothetically accurate collective philology that is wikipedia like some hack-pedantic dumbshit. I suppose this should teach one not to be so quick to make fun of Japanese "tsu-a"rists on the Waikiki strip; travel is tough stuff!
Today Nick, his dad, and I, in a dying-clutch '90 Japanese pickup, hit up the famous Oregon Coast. It was delightfully as eerily color-schemed and pirate-ey as I suspected. It's always a strange, though now I suspect ordinary feeling; having places installed in one's head before ever "being" there in the tedious, un-edited sense. Nick's dad Dennis (or "Denny-kun", as his Nagoya-bred step-wife, Kaoru, kawaii-ly refers to him) is a real big hearted, encyclopedic kind of guy. I couldn't have asked for a better tour guide, and my wine conneusiuership has since been upgraded from Sideways-watching pinot spiller to vortex-swirling savourer. I'm still full of bullshit but I've got down what matters, and what matters is that you look like you know your grape juice. I tried several Oregon brews as well, many apparently orld class, but I just need too say: beer tastes like fucking cold piss but more bitter. It sucks, I don't like it, I'm sorry.
(Not so) amazingly, I hadn't spent more than $20 in this taxless land, having accomplished my mission of freeloading everything from Indonesian curry to wine to conversational Japanese language lessons (courtesy of Kaoru and a family friend, Naoko, also from Nagoya). And at some point between our in-truck discourse onU.S. vs Japan WWII documentaries and the several drive-thru Starbucks and McD stops in otherwise stereotypically unique Pac NW towns, something slipped. Some random stupid epiphany: "I'm a tourist, I should go and buy some souvenirs and take lots of pictures, and shit." And so we stopped at this little shopping center not at all topographically dissimilar from any other I'd been to, except all the shops had a particular cedar shingle architecture. And this one shop, which only sold you see on infomercials.
I snapped off 2/3 of a disposable worth of the Oregon Coast and various iconographics thereof. Bits of culture distinguishing it from any other slice of reality. Mo's Annex, in Newport had probably the best clam chowder I've ever had, I think. Served in a bowl made of sourdough bread... damn. The sea lions hanging out around the docks were incredibly entertaining, just watching the males fight and bark at eachother over the prized space next to the females. The coast itself is so much different from any coastline in Hawaii. All sharp forested cliffs with sparse not-coral colored beaches, floating blotches of kelp, murky green water, gulls, seals, mists and fogs, cold dry wind and ominous overcast lighting. I didn't find any Goonies or pirates (except this one really old, halibut scented food-particle-beard, I snapped a pic of him just in case), but I did buy a bunch of pirate-esque souvenirs, that's got to count for something.
Today Nick, his dad, and I, in a dying-clutch '90 Japanese pickup, hit up the famous Oregon Coast. It was delightfully as eerily color-schemed and pirate-ey as I suspected. It's always a strange, though now I suspect ordinary feeling; having places installed in one's head before ever "being" there in the tedious, un-edited sense. Nick's dad Dennis (or "Denny-kun", as his Nagoya-bred step-wife, Kaoru, kawaii-ly refers to him) is a real big hearted, encyclopedic kind of guy. I couldn't have asked for a better tour guide, and my wine conneusiuership has since been upgraded from Sideways-watching pinot spiller to vortex-swirling savourer. I'm still full of bullshit but I've got down what matters, and what matters is that you look like you know your grape juice. I tried several Oregon brews as well, many apparently orld class, but I just need too say: beer tastes like fucking cold piss but more bitter. It sucks, I don't like it, I'm sorry.
(Not so) amazingly, I hadn't spent more than $20 in this taxless land, having accomplished my mission of freeloading everything from Indonesian curry to wine to conversational Japanese language lessons (courtesy of Kaoru and a family friend, Naoko, also from Nagoya). And at some point between our in-truck discourse onU.S. vs Japan WWII documentaries and the several drive-thru Starbucks and McD stops in otherwise stereotypically unique Pac NW towns, something slipped. Some random stupid epiphany: "I'm a tourist, I should go and buy some souvenirs and take lots of pictures, and shit." And so we stopped at this little shopping center not at all topographically dissimilar from any other I'd been to, except all the shops had a particular cedar shingle architecture. And this one shop, which only sold you see on infomercials.
I snapped off 2/3 of a disposable worth of the Oregon Coast and various iconographics thereof. Bits of culture distinguishing it from any other slice of reality. Mo's Annex, in Newport had probably the best clam chowder I've ever had, I think. Served in a bowl made of sourdough bread... damn. The sea lions hanging out around the docks were incredibly entertaining, just watching the males fight and bark at eachother over the prized space next to the females. The coast itself is so much different from any coastline in Hawaii. All sharp forested cliffs with sparse not-coral colored beaches, floating blotches of kelp, murky green water, gulls, seals, mists and fogs, cold dry wind and ominous overcast lighting. I didn't find any Goonies or pirates (except this one really old, halibut scented food-particle-beard, I snapped a pic of him just in case), but I did buy a bunch of pirate-esque souvenirs, that's got to count for something.
posted by TwiliteMinotaur at
12:57 AM
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