I would have more appropriately written their pharmaceutical needs, but that wouldn’t have had quite the ring to it. In Manhattan, you can’t walk a block before passing a Duane Reade, CVS, or Walgreens pharmacy. It used to be Starbucks, then it was Banks and now it seems to be pharmacies. In Portland, and even in Austin, this is certainly not the case. I ran out of floss upon arriving in Portland and have been hoping to just stumble across one. To no avail. I was about to give up my dental hygiene for the rest of my time in this city until low and behold a massive Walgreens appeared around the corner. My dentist I’m sure will be appreciative.
Portland prides itself on its urban planning and its transportation. Today, I walked into a new neighborhood to check out this artists open studios thing that was going on. To paint a picture, the neighborhood reminded me a bit of Bushwick in Brooklyn, or to those not familiar, it was lots of low industrial buildings, lots of emptiness. Growing up in New York City, I learned that it was always safer to be somewhere where people are, so emptiness can often connote danger for me. I decided that I would leave said new neighborhood and head into town so found my way to a bus stop and waited. Bus 20 was the bus that I was waiting for. I waited about 10 minutes until Bus 12 came along. I took it a few stops to the other side of the river and then walked to the 20 stop. I thought I would wait a bit as I was going pretty far west and it couldn’t be that far behind…I waited, made a few phone calls, waited some more. Finally, after 20 minutes I gave up and walked.
The problem is that Portland, while it has many bus routes, seems like Brooklyn. Just as its quite difficult to get a direct subway route from one part of Brooklyn to another without first going back into Manhattan, it’s hard to go from one part of Portland to another without going through downtown. I noticed in Austin that they seriously favoured North/South bus routes over East/West. It was virtually impossible to catch a bus in that direction! You walked it or you just didn’t go. In Portland, they all seem to run North/South as well with very few connecting the more western parts of the city. Now, I know that public transportation is one of my pet peeves and maybe in another life I could be a brilliant urban planner, but is it really too much to expect? A reasonable bus journey even on a Sunday? Apparently yes, it is…
