PDX to OAK

"So when are you moving up here?"

I hear this everytime I come to the pacific north west on business and spend time with my beloved friends M&M. My brother has decided that this might as well be my second homee and I think there may even be the thought circling around my family and what not that I would pick up and move to this "derevnya" (village). Why am I so bloody inlove with this place? I feel completely at home here. I arrive and its like I haven't left or maybe that I left and came back through a nostalgic portal where I found myslf homesick for the place I already am. If I had to create a list of those things that I find most attractive about the Portland it might look something like this:

Affordable homes

Green, everywhere

Bridges and rivers

Mountains

No sales tax

The microbrew capital of the US

Feeling at home and alien at the same time

Powells

Saturday Market

Vistas and topos

Architecture

A city rich with photography

A sense of something yet to be spoiled

I think that about rounds it out... I mean lets face it. There are some things that are really askew with this place. Everyone drives like it was Sunday. You will get pinched for speeding in this town. There's good food, and there's more and mor ethnic food, but nothing like the gastronomical wonderland that is SF. The ocean is two hours away, ok at my rate of travel maybe more like 90 minutes, but its still far and I've enjoyed living on the lip of the world since I moved to the Richmond. There are some pluses to living here, winter sports are just an hour distant. I suppose part of my laziness to hit the mountains comes from the four hour drive wich can stretch to six with traffic. This doesn't exist here, its so close you can taste the powder as it acrues on the mounttainside.

Of all the major cities I've travelled too and been in, this is one of a handfull that I can live in and see myself growing some serious roots. I can see myself living in NYC for a spell of time, but I'm mot sure I want to shoot my roots too deep into that soil. I don't think I could do Chicago, there's no contour there, the land is too flat. St. Petersburg, I want to know what its like in the winter, that ominous darkness of being near the North Pole, and then moving into the mystical light of white nights as the summer months stumble through the calendar, but I doubt I could stay there for ever either. South CA is out of the question, not much in the way of he midwest attracts me, but Portland, yes, I do find myself able to spell h-o-m-e here. Maybe its a foregon conclusion and just a matter of time, but this place calls me.