My boss decided it was time to spend the money in the budget for team activities in a really cool way - lunch out at Portland City Grill (alcohol included - I had two bellinis), followed by a walking tour of Portland (her choice was the seedy, underground tour that did actually take us underground for a small portion of our journey through Portland's downtown). We learned how the downtown section south of Burnside along the waterfront was formed by two prominent men - Pettygrove and Quimby (if I remember correctly). These two dudes built roads according to compass North. Captain Couch (pronounced "cooch") was responsible for NW Portland, where he implemented a numerical and alphabetical street naming system for easy navigation. (He's a sea captain, those folks are all about navigating.) Anyway, Captain Couch, perhaps a pirate?, [my aside, not the tour leader's] used the stars to sail the seas, and thereby developed his section of Portland using true North. So if you stand on the dividing line you can see the streets from downtown heading compass North and the streets in NW heading true North. Pretty neat, eh?
We learned what it meant to be shanghaied, that the Willamette used to be home to floating brothels, and how Old Town Chinatown started out as Japantown before World War II. (For more information on Executive Order 9066 that removed the Japanese to internment camps, click here.) When our fearless tour guide made an offhand comment that we "no longer go to war for no reason" only two people complained about the inappropriateness of her statement - midwesterners far as I can tell.
Our day ended at Kell's where we had some crazy waiter guy that kept reciting his bad poetry and going off to the corner to cry. The Guinness was good so she left him a nice tip.
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