Today has been a day exploring Portland, Oregon. It’s a beautiful city, with the gigantic Mount Hood dominating the horizon off to the East, and a river running through the heart of it. The weather has been absolutely gorgeous – not too so ridiculously hot as the be uncomfortable, but really nice and sunny. A real bonus, considering that the locals tell me it’s been raining really hard until last week.
I braved the city’s excellent “TriMet” public transport system – consisting of buses, a light railway (the “Max”) and also some trams, I believe. They’ve got a great website that Transport for London could learn a few lessons from, where you can plan your route and see it all on a nice interactive mappy thing. When I got a bit lost the locals were also incredibly helpful and soon put me right.
I used the buses to go and visit the science museum here, OMSI (pronounced “Om-Zee” rather than “O.M.S.I.” – people had no idea what I was talking about at first when I was asking for directions!)
Among other things they have the Game On exhibition at the moment, where you can sample the history of video games, going all the way back to Pong and Space Invaders and so on, through to the present day. I was invited to have a go at a game involving some kind of contraption that supposedly measures your concentration to make a little man push a tomato – I can’t say I was convinced, since I won despite being thoroughly distracted by the fact that this thing was slowly slipping off my head!
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