Letter from Boston Visit To Portland, Oregon By MASAKO YAMADA	フレームで見る  英文をプリントする  脚注をプリントする
オレゴン州の町を旅する 最近、雅子さんは週末を利用して西海岸のオレゴン州ポートランドを旅しました。ロサンゼルスのように大きくて有名な町ではありませんが、町の施設はすばらしく、人の気性もおおらかです。また、海あり、山あり、川ありの、風光明媚な地形をしています。

Although I'm a big fan of the '70s Village People song "Go West," I myself have never dreamed of uprooting myself and starting a new life out there. However, I'm quite intrigued by West Coast culture, since it seems so different from that of my native East Coast.

My boyfriend is currently working in Portland, Ore., and he has told me a little bit about the differences he's seen. I was recently given the opportunity to take a free trip there, so I decided to take advantage of this.

Portland is not as famous as Los Angeles, San Francisco or Seattle, but it has the friendly energy of an up-and-coming city. When I got off the plane, I noticed volunteers with "Ask Me" T-shirts walking around the airport and giving directions to confused travelers. The cab driver who took me downtown eagerly chatted about the city as well.

Many of the buildings had plaques proclaiming that they'd been built in the '90s, and it was obvious that it meant the 1990s.

The public library shocked me because it was so modern. There was a user-friendly reading room where people could browse the WWW for free and read library books while sipping Starbucks cof fee! There were electronic machines where patrons could check out their books by running the books over a bar-code sensor and sliding their library cards through. All debts to the library from overdue books could be paid by credit card as well.

The shiny, new Portland facilities were certainly impressive, but the doings of Mother Nature were far more surprising to me. One Japanese woman who has lived in Portland for many years said, "If you don't like Portland weather, just wait five minutes." Indeed, during a day's drive around Portland, I saw blue skies, rain, snow, hail, fog and a double rainbow.

There's also a wide range of scenery to match the weather changes, since Portland is equally close to the mountains and to the sea. My boyfriend and I took a drive along the Pacific Ocean and around Mount Hood. We saw gushing waterfalls, snow-capped forests of Douglas firs, bustling ski areas, and forlorn, seaside resort towns with lots of empty beachfront motels.

It was obvious that these towns cater to summer tourists. We stopped at one of these tiny towns and were surprised to see that the amusement park rides were operating even in the winter.

We rode the bumper cars. Since there was nothing else to do, we also decided to go to a chocolate trade show held at the town convention center. The vendors sold unmistakably American products — there were no European-style truffles or bon bons in sight — but they had a distinctly local feel. Many of the vendors dipped locally-grown hazelnuts and dried cherries in chocolate. One of them served Oregon wine with local Tillamook cheese.

Tillamook cheese is nationally famous, so we visited the factory outside Portland. The factory was very commercialized and uninteresting — I had secretly hoped to see milkmaids milking cows in the backyard — but we ate some excellent ice cream made with local berries. My ice cream flavor was marionberry. I'd never heard of the fruit. I was told that it is a cross between a blueberry and a raspberry.

The Pacific Northwest is also famous for fish such as trout, salmon and sturgeon. We visited a fish hatchery on the Columbia River run by the U.S. government. This hatchery releases millions of fish into the river every year in order to replenish the dwindling supply. We saw huge sturgeon swimming in one of the tanks. The signs informed us that the sturgeon hasn't evolved much since the age of the dinosaurs and that the fish lives a very long time. It was interesting, but I couldn't help getting a bit hungry for smoked sturgeon and black caviar.

I found the Portland combination of lots of nature and urban growth quite appealing. The cab driver who took me back to the airport — a Portland native — told me that he likes that Portland people are more laid back than people out East. It was also clear that he loves the sea. However, he also told me that he didn't like that Portland is changing. He felt that it is becoming too trendy. He despised all the chic, urbane people chatting in acc cafeﾑs or window-shopping in the boutiques.

It made me realize that in such growing cities, the gap between the old-timers and the fast-forwarding youth can be very large.

Shukan ST: Feb. 19, 1999

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