10-09-2023 Entry

This was a decent day, with the first Portland-typical weather of our trip.  After breakfast, we walked down to the Peculiarium, which was on the same street as our Airbnb.  I knew it was going to be hokey, and I was not disappointed.  But Ann and I got into the kookiness of it and had a good time walking through the small "museum."  Surprisingly, there were a lot of people there, and it was only then that we realized it was Indigenous People's Day and a federal holiday.  After going through the museum, we walked up 23 Ave, looking at shops and eventually getting to an oddities shop, Paxton Gate, that specialized in taxidermy and skull/skeleton displays.  They also had some nice insect displays as well as rocks and minerals.  It was mildly entertaining, and Ann talked to one of the people who worked there, who turned out to be from Escondido.  Small world!  We walked back down, stopping in a couple of shops before having lunch at a Burmese food restaurant, where we were served by a robot for the first time.  They got my order wrong initially, but eventually it came (jackfruit curry), and it was decent, perhaps a little too plain in the number of different vegetables but a good general idea.  We walked over to the supermarket and got some snacks for the plane and other food items.  Then we walked back to the Airbnb and hung out in the afternoon.  Had thought about going to see a movie, but I didn't see any films that would be appealing to both of us.  Dinner there.  Ann proposed going to a music jam session at a bar in the Pearl District, and that sounded different, so we went.  There, we met a couple of really chatty guys, one of whom was a drummer/bassist who worked as a software engineer.  He tried to get me to sign up to play bass in one of the jam sessions, but that wasn't going to happen.  The other guy was a little older than us, had grown up in Hawthorne, and was very knowledgeable about music and concerts.  We talked about different concert experiences, and he really was into Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys.  It was nice talking with him.  Near the end of our conversation, he said he didn't have long to live, but we didn't get into the details.  Back to the Airbnb via the bus.