First Days in Portland

Because of a little complication with the photos, we weren't able to get the pics of our first few weeks here til now, so I will jump back a bit and take you along while I share how our journey started when we got here!

After we arrived from the airport we conked out and slept like babies and had a tasty breakfast with Grammy's homemade raspberry jam and coffee the next morning.  After that, we were on our way to Portland!  It'd been quite a few years since I had been and Joseba had never even seen this city he had committed to living in, so it was a must!  Although I grew up a stone's throw from Portland, OR, I honestly don't know much more than Joseba about it.  Granted I know the freeways a bit, the layout and where Saturday Market is, but other than that, I only really know Portland for where I used to shop for school clothes, so this was an adventure for both of us!

We first stopped off in the area where we had been looking for apartments - the Mississippi neighborhood in NE Portland.  Portland is divided into 4 quadrants basically.  The Willamette River seperates East from West and Burnside Street seperates North from South.  We live in the NE area in an up-and-coming area near cute shops, restaurants and parks.  But, back to our first day - we parked in the NE area and strolled the streets til we found our first official lunch spot in Portland, OR - a place called Wolf and Bear's.  Seeing as it was sunny it was completely acceptable to eat outside of this food cart, which are all the rage in Portland.  It's basically a little snack shack where they cook you up a tasty meal in a small trailer and you eat it right there or at some picnic tables or small eating area near the spot and enjoy a little taste of heaven!  Neither one of us had eaten at one before and were looking forward to the occasion, so when we spotted this one on Mississippi Ave we stopped off.  We took a snap to commemerate Joseba's first meal as a Portlander as he sat on a picnic table in the parking lot with a little gnome in the garden staring him down!  We dined on variations of the Falafel Wrap - hummus, caramelized onions, roasted red peppers, grilled eggplant, parsley, falafel and salad greens covered with tahini sauce on a warm pita.  Tasty!

With the sun still shining we drove down to a free parking lot and hopped on MAX - the light rail system in Portland - to Downtown.  Although Portlander's main form of transport is the car, the city has been planned and developed with urban transportation in mind - be it bikes, buses or trams - which is one of the reasons we picked it as our new hometown. 

We got off in Downtown and were surprised at how laid-back and calm the city was, even on a Friday at mid-day.  While it boasts the title as Oregon's largest city, it is only the 29th largest city in the US, so it still maintains some of the small town feel with all the amentities of the big metro area. 

We wandered up and down the streets, pointing out gorgeous brick buildings and fun shops.  Seeing as that Portland was once a timber town, many of the buildings of the early era were built in bricks to avoid burning.  Many still stand to this day and make a gorgeous contrast against the newer skyrises.  We eventually stumbled upon Powell's Books - the self-proclaimed largest independant bookstore in America and the largest bookstore West of the Mississippi (about as American of a phrase out there!).  With a multi-story building that takes up an entire city block, Powell's City of Books  has something like 68,000 square feet of retail space!  That's a lot of books!  As an obviously avid reader, it's sort of like a little heaven where you can just go in and get lost in an avalanche of books.  Listed as one of top 10 bookstores in the nation according to USA Today, it is a huge tourist attraction for visitors but also a hopping spot for locals alike. 

After dining at a food cart, wandering the streets and then buying books at Powell's the next thing to do on our 'get to know Portland' list was to have some beer!  Known throughout the country as a beer haven, Oregon as a state has a reputation as a beer-lover's place and Portland is no different.  With tons of local breweries, Portlanders pride themselves on a good pint of beer and have so many options that you can get silly just trying them all!  While most people hear of wine-tasting, the Northwest also offers beer-tasting where just like the former, you can order a couple of beers to taste and test out.  Not only that, it seems that every bar we have been in, with thier massive list of beers on the menu or on tap, you can just outright ask if you can try a few before committing to your order and the smiley waiter will gladly oblige and bring you a couple to try out before you down a pint!  It's amazing!  I am not the most schooled girl on beer yet and get a bit confused when words like barley, malt and hopps are thrown around, but I am doing my best to learn and do my fair share of testing too! 

For our first day we stopped off at a local brewery that has made it quite big - Deschutes Brewery.  With something like 10 beers just on tap, we ventured into ordering a Obsidian Stout for Joseba and a Chainbreaker IPA for me.  To show you that beer is not merely a tailgating or boring drink, take a look at the descriptions for our brews which make you just want to come visit and order one right now!
 - Obsidian Stout -

Deep, robust and richly rewarding, this is beer to linger over. Obsidian has distinct notes of espresso, chocolate, roasted malt and black barley, with just enough hop bite to cut the sweetness.
Malt: Pale, Crystal, Carapils, Munich, Black Barley, Roasted Barley, Wheat
Hops: Nugget, Millennium, Willamette, Northern Brewer

IBUs 55 | Alcohol by Vol. 6.4%

 

- Chainbreaker IPA - 

Deschutes is taking you into the next beer frontier. Brewed with wheat and pilsner malt; this IPA displays beautiful citrus aromas from Cascade and Citra hops that meld with the esters of Belgian yeast. Think thirst quenching hopped-up wit beer with enough IBUs to warrant the IPA name.
Malt: Pilsner, Wheat, Unmalted Wheat
Hops: Bravo, Citra, Centennial, Cascade
Other: Sweet Orange, Coriander

IBUs 55 | Alcohol by Vol. 5.6%

 

Only the first of many beers as we make ourselves more at home, we soon after continued with our meandering and eventually had to stop off for a burger at Theo's.  This restaurant happily makes thier burgers and sandwiches with high quality ingredients, like many spots in Portland, OR.  The truth is that many dining spots in Portland go above and beyond that and make thier dishes with local organic ingredients.  Slow Food instead of Fast Food is really a thing in Portland.  Granted, there are McDonald's and Burger Kings floating around but many people would rather stop off at a local café for thier lunch.  Besides eating local with restaurants that provide fresh ingredients from down the street, just living here a bit we have seen lots of little community gardens and local produce markets.  We have one just down the street from us that we plan on going to this coming Tuesday for some veggies grown literally in our same zip code!  

 

After munching on our burgers, it became dark and we decided that for our first day in the States, we had done well at starting our ongoing exploration of this new city and got really excited to be able to find a place and move down!  

 

More to come soon!

Amanda

 

 

The Quest for the Perfect Car

In true American fashion, Joseba and I decided that we should buy a car while living here.  Although we picked Portland for its great public transportation system, if we want to go out of town or drive up to Kelso to see the fam, a car was going to be neccessary, so the search began.

We started almost as soon as we arrived.  We started off with a low budget of like $1500 and hoping for a decent car but then after searching online and seeing what kind of selection we had for that price range we beefed it up to about $3000.  Hoping for a reliable car that would run for many more miles we started the search with Hondas, which although they are not so popular in Europe are amazingly ubiquitous here.

We searched and searched but it seemed a $3000 budget for Honda was only going to get a car that was atleast 15 years old, which is not exactly what we were hoping for.  We ventured off into the Toyota and Nissan worlds hoping to find a steal but just couldn't find anything that checked all of our boxes - clean title, good miles, car in good shape, etc.

We mostly used Craigslist.com to find our cars - which is basically an online classified ad site that has everything from cooking class and cars to jobs and artwork.  Anyone who has a car can post on it, and some of the ads that we saw were so bad that we just knew they didn't even deserve a call.  Here are a few of our favorite lines from the ads for cars we looked at:

- I selling my Honda Civic 2001 (DX Model) Clean Title with 145xxxml,- Automatic tranny, Its very nice comunity car very nice for gas, Its have good tires, brikes., Strong body, clean inerior -Never been smoked, Its very maintance car.  This one I love because I love a nice community car, don't you?  And forget brakes, who doesn't want a nice set of brikes?!  The part that concerns me is that the car has never been smoked.  Cigarettes I have tried but smoking a Honda...is that commonplace now?

- CD PLAYER PLUS SEX CD EXCHANGER.  Does anyone else see the error in this?  I know that some R&B tunes really get you in the mood, but is it possible to have a SEX CD changer?  Is that why this car was so expensive?  Six...that's more like it.

- Please excuse the pine needles inside of the car in picture.  This one I love because the guy didn't take the 5 minutes to vaccuum out his car before taking the photos for the ad and instead put this disclaimer.  Classy.

- Engine is in a very good shape, doesn't burn oil.  It doesn't burn oil?!  Is that a regular thing to note?  

- just little dimp at the back door.  What's a dimp?!

- we can meet up at Seven Eleven store on SE Foster and SE 97th anytime.  Hahahah, it had to be 7-11!  This sounds more like it is in the personal ads than the car ads.

- only problems are you have to disconnect the battery every time your done driving it and it won't go into 5th gear.  Oh, those are the only problems?!  Those seem a bit serious to me.

Anyways, you get the drift of what we had to look through.  The biggest problem we came up against was the 'rebuilt', 'reconstructed' or 'salvage' titles.  According to CarFax (a website where you can check the history of your car online with the VIN number) they mean the following:

 - Salvage: A Salvage Title is issued on a vehicle damaged to the extent that the cost of repairing the vehicle exceeds ~ 75% of its pre-damage value. This damage threshold may vary by state. Some states treat Junk titles the same as Salvage but the majority use this title to indicate that a vehicle is not road worthy and cannot be titled again in that state. The following eleven states also use Salvage titles to identify stolen vehicles - AZ, FL, GA, IL, MD, MN, NJ, NM, NY, OK and OR.

 - Rebuilt and Reconstructed: A Rebuilt/Reconstructed vehicle is a salvage vehicle that has been repaired and restored to operation. These vehicles are often severely damaged before they are rebuilt and refurbished parts are typically used during reconstruction. In most states, an inspection of the vehicle is required before the vehicle is allowed to return to the road. 

Every time we thought we found an amazing deal on a car, the deal-breaker would be that it was one of those three types of titles.  Because the cars can be repaired enough to get them back on the roads, sometimes massive problems remain and you can buy a car with one of these titles and then a few months into it it just goes bad and you're out of luck.  There are a lot of crooks who buy damaged cars, fix them up enough that you can buy them, sell you them and then soon down the road it breaks down and you have a broken car and a bad title on your hands.  The resale value of the car is said to be atleast 60% less than the regular resale value if it has one of these titles.  Since we are planning on eventually selling it, as soon as we saw those words we just closed it and moved.  

The search widened even more and finally we added import cars to the list.  We had been driving my Grammy's Buick around and since it had been almost a month since she loaned it to us, really wanted to get it back to her so were really searching around for cars!  Finally, we found a nice Volvo that we liked and met the owner at a park just near our house.  

After having met with many people who weren't from here and barely spoke English, we were happy to meet a couple (the boy from here and the girl from Florida) selling the car.  The 2002 Volvo S40 had been a family car until they gave it to the girl, their daughter, for her vehicle.  Now that she moved up to live with the boyfriend, they didn't need her car and were looking to sell it, which is where we come in.

When we met them they had a massive folder of all the maitenence records since the car had been bought new showing everything - oil changes, new tire purchases, belt changes, etc.  The car was gorgeous - leather seats, sun roof, gorgeous interior, cruise control (not as common as you think) and an automatic (my main wish).  We loved it as soon as we saw it but of course had to bargain down a bit.  

When we finally shook hands it felt good to have finally found our car and was a HUGE thing to cross off our to-do list.  In the end, it was almost like looking for a house and I for one will not be sad to not look on Craigslist for a long time for another car.

So here we are - living in Oregon, riding vintage bikes, eating organic food, drinking local wines, driving reliable cars - who are we?!

Spoke-tactular

Before moving to Portland we already knew one big thing about it - it is incredibly bike-friendly.  Listed as the city that has the most bike commuters (people who use their bike as their transport to and from work) in the nation. 

When we first got the the States we came down to Portland to check our new town out.  And it was true - bikes were everywhere!  And not little 'I'm going on an afternoon ride' models, but serious 'i'm riding across town and maybe further' bikes.  There were bike lines on the streets and where there weren't the cars cooperated easily with the bikers.  Crossing bridges there were lanes designated just for bikes!  In the end it seemed maybe the bikes even went faster as we saw in traffic in our gas-guzzling vehicle. 

We knew that we just had to buy bikes and put it at the top of our list right next to a couch and bed.  Really.  Since we weren't sure if we were going to be among the bike commuters, we wanted to start out with some nice bikes that were more for cruising than serious pedaling.  We became avid Craigslist searchers and found 2 gorgeous vintage bikes. 

 Joseba's is a Vintage Montgomery Ward men's cycle in green and mine a Vintage Woman's Huffy in a brown.  They are both 3-speeds, which requires us to stop to change gears, but they are awesome and pretty retro.  The owner was a biker himself and when he passed them over to us said he even thought everything was original, down to the brakes, which is cute but also a bit scary!  Regardless, we got the pair for $90, a steal! 

Between moving and setting up the house we didn't get to use the bikes til the end of our first week as Portlanders and then we finally made ourselves real locals when we pulled the bikes out of the basement and headed out on the town with them. 

We coasted down Vancouver Avenue in our bike lane and then shared the road for two blocks before we got off on a multi-use path (for bikers, runners, etc) and crossed the Burnside Bridge to West Portland.  We rode along the river on a beautiful sunny day, taking in the greenery along the river and passing a few bike shops (I need a fancy bell).  We managed to ride into Downtown which was originally a bit intimidating - we didn't want to get eaten by a street car or mowed over by a truck, but Downtown Portland is incredibly laid-back and calm.  It didn't seem like a city center at all and we were able to easily cruise til we got some grub.

We made our way back to our side of the river by crossing the Hawthorne Bridge (you will learn Portland is a town of many bridges) and again along the river.  The pathway goes literally along the river, about a foot above river level and so many people were out being active on the sunny day. 

Besides a hard bike seat making my bum a bit sore, the day was fantastic and a first of many bike days.  Rain is forecasted to come soon, but after our first ride, I am sure that we will be happy to go out for a ride, even if it's sprinkling.

You May Pass Go

This driving stuff has been nice since I have been home.  I hadn't driven a car in The Basque Country the entire time I lived there, so after having visited the US the last time, it had been over 3 years since I sat in the driver's side of the car.  Now I'm back at it like a champ thanks to Grammy loaning us her car while we look for our own - the Buick.

The only catch though, is that now that I am an Oregon resident, I am required to get an Oregon license to drive here.  I think it is something like after 30 days of being a resident you must have the license of this state.  And although I have technically only been an Oregon resident since move-in day, October 1st, I figured I'd get it out of the way early.

Being licensed in Arizona, it was quite easy for me to get an Oregon license.  I didn't need to worry about the whole practical exam where you take our your car for a spin with the DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles) and show him how bad you parellel park or anything.  However, I did need to pass the written part of the exam - something I haven't studied for since I got my license when I was 16.  That is where it was a bit tricky.

So on this lovely morning, I headed down to the DMV about 10 minutes from my house, expecting massive lines.  In every DMV I have ever been in, the wait time is something ridiculous like an hour minimum.  Here though, my number was called in about 5-10 minutes which allowed me a few minutes to leaf through the Oregon State Driver's Manual. Check out the link for some entertaining reading.  It's about 100 pages and a lot of common sense, so my strategy, if you could call it that, was to just take the test and see if I passed or not and if I didn't pass atleast I would know what I needed to study,  because I wasn't in the mood to read a 100-page manual.

In the time I paged through it, I learned that expert drivers scan the driving scene 12 seconds ahead.  Didn't know that.  Also found out that the yellow lights that I have always known and loved are not called yellow, but in fact they are deemed amber.

With this little knowledge, my number was called and I was ushered off to the testing area, where it was all done on a touch-screen computer.  In a test of 35 questions, I had to answer atleast 80% correct, meaning I could only get seven wrong.  Eight meant fail and I'd have to pay the $5 fee again and come back tomorrow to press my luck and maybe even study some.  The questions were all multiple choice with four options and I was banking on the fact that I was a good driver but when the first few questions were toughies and by question 12 I was already not doing so hot.

Here were the ones I 1) didn't know or 2) didn't remember from my driver's education class when I was 15.  Did you know that a blind person (well, a person carrying a white cane) has the right of way at an intersection even if you have a green light?!  I thought the driver did, so got that one wrong.  Thinking back, I guess it does make sense.  Another miss was the most likely way to injure a motorcylist while driving a car.  I didn't know and guessed that following too closely would be the money maker, but turns out it is turning left in front of them.  I also didn't know that if you are being tailed by someone who obviously wants to pass you and you're going the speed limit that instead of mainting your correct speed that you should slow down even more (which I bet would make the driver behind you even more annoyed) and encourage him to pass.  How do you encourage someone in another car to pass?  These were 3 wrongs I got right off the bat.

Then it seemed to turn easy.  One question showed this sign and said what does this mean.  Ummmm, I think even if you never studied you would know that is a no U-turn sign.  Easy question.  There were a few more like that - what should you do at a yellow light?  Speed through it?  Slam on your brakes? Stop if you can otherwise continue.  Obviously!

Anyways, I had 7 wrong anwers (chalk it up to not studying for 10 years) and still had 10 questions left, none of which I could get wrong!  I passed through and happily returned to the desk where they checked my eye sight and then took my beautiful photo, my check for $60 and then handed me a temporary paper license.  The whole thing took about an hour, which is what I was expecting just to wait for my number to be called.  All in all, my new license picture with bangs officially makes me an Oregonian!

Everything is BIG!

One of the first things that Joseba noticed about America when we arrived and that still catches his eye is the massive size of everything comparing with Europe.  When we deboarded the plane you don't notice it so much in the Sea-Tac airport, and going through Customs or Immigration either.  But when we hit the road it became very apparent and for his first sight of the continental US, he was shocked.

It started with my mom's car - a big Chevy Astro van (I think).  It has seating for 8 or you can fold down the seats and throw a mattress in it.  She loves it because she can cart around the whole family, grandkids and all, but to Joseba it was bigger than he ever imagined a regular passenger vehicle to be.  We had just been camping in the South of Spain in a van of similar size and here we had lived in it for a week!  Motor-homes the size of our apartment just don't exist in Europe, so the camping van is about as big as they get there.

Once belted in, we whizzed down the freeway, passing massive billboards and store signs.  Again, a practice that is quite uncommon where he is from, he said 'it's just like the movies' and I guess it is.

We stopped off for dinner and proceeded to order.  Being very American, I went ahead and ordered a strawberry lemonade, something I hadn't had for years and felt I should try it out again.  Joseba did the euro-thing and ordered water.  When the glass came, it was quite big comparing to what we are used to.  In Europe, if you order say a Coke or something, you get the amount that fits in the can or little bottle it is manufactured in.  After we finished my lemonade, he was confused as to why the waiter just brought out another one - free refills.  Essentially, I could drink as much as I wanted - 32oz, 64oz, even more!  Is bigger better?  I only managed to polish off the first drink with his help and sadly we left the entire second cup full when we left.

The bigness continued when we arrived at Grammy's where the first thing he noticed was how big the toilet paper was.  I know, it seems like a funny thing to notice, but leave it to a foreigner to think of something that probably has never crossed your mind...your bum yes.  With a plethora of toilet paper options - 2-ply, 1-ply, quilted, extra soft and more - Joseba was mostly confused as to why the sheets were so WIDE?  This one still gives him a kick today. 

Living at Grammy's house for a bit was a lesson in BIG sizes.  As a Costco member (a wholesale club store where you can buy things in large quantaties and get big savings) she is able to get big things at a small price.  For example, soy sauce - while the only size available that we have ever seen in the Basque Country is the typical 8.5 or 10oz (240g or 283g) one, my Grammy has it is a 40oz container (1133g)!  I mean, if you know you're going to use it, what's the harm?  While Joseba's eyes bugged out when he saw that, he too fell victim to the 'it's a better price if I buy a lot of it at the same time' syndrome when we bought all of our toiletries and came home with a bottle of body lotion that will probably last us a year.  To top it off, Grammy even has a gigantic coffee mug that she drinks from each morning, stating that she only has 1 cup a day!  Now that is bigger = better at its best!

While speaking about food we can segway into two more big things that affect each other - the portion sizes and the people sizes here.  On our first day in Seattle we stopped of at a quick-serve Chinese restaurant to order some chow-mein and be on our touristy way.  When we saw the portion size, we decided that splitting one was probably the best way to go and got full from 1 serving portion together.  As many of you are well aware, the portion sizes in America are ever expanding, while in Europe it seems that they are staying close to the same.  Save for big cities like London, Berlin and other capitals, it seems that if you order something for dinner, you won't get even close to half as much as if you were ordered in the States.  This has a direct effect on the waist lines of our citizens. This obesity business with be a whole different blog someday, so I'll move on.

From semi-truck cabs (lorry) and pick-up trucks to stores and parking lots, Joseba has noticed that in America, everything seems to run size L.  Partially that is influenced by the fact that we live in the West, a vast part of the country that when settled was not built in the likes of the East Coast's NYC, Boston or Philly.  Here, our streets are wide and lined by old massive trees.  With so much space we have been able to build stores that wouldn't even be thought about in The Basque Country - with 2 or three floors of selection.  The list goes on and on.  But we have to remember that our country is pretty much the same size as the entire continent of Europe (3.5 million square miles vs. 3.9).  In the land where bigger is often considered better, Joseba is having a lot of laughs and suprised moments discovering the big differences. 

More to come soon!

Everyone knows about my alien!

Just a quick blog to let you know that I published my immigration in The Daily News today.  It's a bit reminiscent of the blog I wrote on here, but check it out anyways HERE.  It's also in my Travel Columns page here on the blog. 

Thanks for reading!
Amanda

The New Place in this New Place

After having been here for 3 weeks, we were overjoyed to sign the apartment lease papers for our first apartment in Portland!  We had done lots of searching while still in the Basque Country but ran into the problem that all of the apartments were available for move in NOW, which isn't so good when you're still an ocean away.  So, when we arrived we hit the road running and head to Portland, Oregon to search for our perfect place. 

The first place was nice, but small and the windows looked right into the neighbor's windows. I mean, I could just ask the neighbor to make me a coffee and pass it over.  Not my cup of tea...err coffee.  It was dubbed a 'vintage' place which in my thinking means old but fashionable and nice.  Apparently, 'vintage' as we learned at this place just meant old.  We passed.

The next place we looked at was a place we didn't even get the chance to look at!  We were pretty hyped about it and the listing said there would be an Open House, where you can do a walk-through of the apartment, at 1pm on the day we happened to be in town.  We arrived about 15 minutes early and the open house had already started and 2 applications had already been received from the 20-something people that were there.  The owner stated that it was basically already rented but if we wanted to take a gander we were welcome.  We figured there was no use in wasting time seeing a place we weren't going to get so we headed to have lunch and prep ourselves for the next place in this cut-throat renting market!

Having lived in NYC I knew that renting a good place could be pretty brutal but in laid-back Portland I wouldn't have expected it.  The third place that we saw was the place we eventually signed the paperwork on, but it took a bit of skill to get it!  We arrived early for the Open House and saw two other couples (one married and the other two friends) that had happened to be at the previous Open House.  We knew they were obviously interested and this was our cash cow - the one we really wanted!

We had chosen to look in the NorthEast part of Portland thanks to some tips from some high school friends I have that said that it is the 'it' spot right now.  Areas like Mississippi and Alberta are adorable up-and-coming areas that used to be a bit dodgy but now people are really working on making them more invitable and exciting.  With hip bars, concert venues, tasty restaurants and lots of parks and an equal amount of shops, it reminded us a lot of the Kreuzberg neighborhood in Berlin that we so fell in love with.  Our first day in the US (after a long sleep) we came down to Portland wandered around the neighborhood and just agreed that it was the place for us.   

Built in 1910, this Craftsman house had been divided into a top and ground floor units.  We were looking at the top floor unit which had lots of windows and a private entrance.  The 14 steep steps to the top were a bit to make us catch our breath, but when we got in the apartment, Joseba and I just fell in love with it.  The living area was combined with the dining area which connected to the robin's egg blue kitchen with new appliances.  The bathroom was nice-sized and had a great shower head and tons of storage space.  The bedrooms, there were two, were great and perfect for what we were looking to use them for - one for sleeping and one for Joseba's music studio.  The heating was gas and heck there was even a washer and dryer, which we didn't seem to have much luck finding included in the price in other places we'd searched out.

Seeing as we weren't the only people seeing the place, and figuring everyone else was liking it as much as we were, I slyly asked the landlord if she could show me the washer and dryer and where they were located.  I wasn't SO concerned with seeing if it was a front-loading or top-loading washer, but really just wanted to get the landlord to ourselves so we could tell her that we wanted it!  She took us down the scarily vertical stairs again to our own basement with ample storage and the W/D units.  I saw them real quick and then went out to the driveway with her as the other people peered in the basement.  It was then that Joseba and I made eyes, speaking without words that we HAD TO have this place, and I told her we'd like to start the application process!  We'd done it!  The other people looked a bit deflated that we had gotten our interest in first and headed out and we headed back upstairs to do a mountain of paperwork to get the renting process started.

Here, to rent, they do criminal checks and background checks - a process the landlord can charge anywhere from $25 to $50 per application (aka $100 for us together) to check into all this stuff.  We even had to give our past landlord references and our landlord called them in Basque Country to confirm that we were the amazing tenants we promised her that we were! 

We were so excited about submitting the application that we went to a bar down the street for a celebratory beer at a place called Kenny & Zuke's, just a stone's throw from our place.  We fell in love with the neighborhood right away.  So many little cafes and restaurants dotted the streets that were lined with massive maple and oak trees.  The leaves had just started falling and although it was sunny you could feel the crisp air coming in.  The waitress was incredibly friendly, people whizzed by on bicycles and we toasted to hoping this became our everyday.  

When we finally got the ok that we got the apartment we were in Seattle (another blog about that another time) and celebrated with my Dad, Stepmom and Bro with a glass of wine - well my  brother didn't have a glass but he celebrated with us anyways.  We were so relieved!  The funny thing is that this apartment is one that we fell in love with when we were still abroad and actually emailed our landlord stating our extreme interest.  We basically told her, we would take it sight unseen, but she responded saying there was too much interest and it wouldn't be available by time we made it to Portland.  Luck have it, when we arrived in Kelso we saw the ad posted again and forwarded her our previous email saying that we still were interested in the place.  Turns out that guy who was going to rent it didn't work out in the end and the place was available!  The landlord told us that she thought that our previous email was a scam - one of those, oh my business associate will collect the money because I happen to be overseas sham.  It wasn't, just us :)

We got the keys about a week later and started Operation Furniture.  In the Basque Country apartments come relatively if not completely furnished a lot of times.  Here that is pretty much out of the question unless you're looking to pay a hefty extra fee.  So, IKEA, Target and even Wal-Mart became our destinations of place after some serious second-hand shopping on Craigslist.com.

IKEA is always a blast until you get to the checkout but we ended up getting everything we needed and shoved it all in the basement and headed off to Ashland, OR (again, another blog to come) for our last week before becoming official Portland residents.  

And here we are!  Every house has it's weird things though.  Our house seems to slant in a U - like in the kitchen the wine bottles roll east but in the living room the table tilts west.  But, the light that flows in the windows, the wine boxes with flowers falling out of them and the lovely group of girl neighbors downstairs more than makes up for it. 

We have only been in the house about five days and have mostly everything set up.  The stairs make for a workout bringing things up to our apartment, but it's great to watch our first place come together.  Unpacking the massive boxes I saved at my Grammy's house while having lived abroad, it is quite comical the things that I felt were super important to save for my return.  I have DVDs that I have no desire to see again, lots of sheets but not so many pillow cases, a George Foreman grill that I could probably buy for something like $10 now, scrapobooking stuff for a hobby that never took off and probably never will, and more. 

We've made it to the knick-knack stage, having passed the big furniture stuff already.  It's all in the details!  And, we have an air mattress already, so are happily accepting guests in Hotel Amanda & Joseba - Portlandiapartment.  Free locally brewed beer (another blog, lots to come) and live jam sessions byJoseba included and maybe a banana bread by Amanda if you're lucky!

If you want our address, shoot me an email and I'll send it over!  Will post more pics once we have become a bit more organized.  We are so excited to have a homebase to share our new experiences in this gorgeous city with you.  

Amanda

Sorry for no blogs!

Hi everyone!  I know I have been quite MIA lately, but don't think I have forgotten about you!  Joseba and I have been in the country almost 3 weeks to the day and in that short amount of time we have travelled to Seattle for some glorious sunshine, poked around our new city of Portland while trying to figure out why everyone says its so weird (we love it just the way it is), did a week-long trip in Ashland, OR where we saw Shakespeare at its best, hiked the gorgeous Crater Lake and wine-tasted and successfully found a place to live and furnished it!  It's been a whirlwind and we haven't really stopped since we arrived.  Apart from my book club meeting the first week of being here, I haven't read a single page of my Kindle for weeks - a shocking fact if you know me.

I just wanted to let everyone know that we ARE ok and enjoying life to the fullest.  While it is normally getting a bit misty and gray here we have been so lucky to have sunny skies since we arrived and just bought some bikes and hopefully will get out and enjoy them soon! 

I have put a youtube video of Portland, OR below so you can have a little taste of this new place I call home. 



If you want my address, shoot me an email at amanda.gonser@gmail.com and I will give it to you.  Upcoming blogs will feature:  entering the US with my alien husbana, excursion to Seattle, Craiglisting my life away, our new place, everything Ashland, our first trip to the grocery store (they ARE as big as everyone says they are),  the job search, shocking American things for Joseba, beer and more. 

More to come soon!


Amanda