Adventures in Portland

I’ve returned from Portland, intact if not a little tired.  Portland is a beautiful city, with a lot to see and do.  Their downtown area is about the same size as ours.  Two things struck me as very interesting.

First, the city is by far the cleanest city I’ve ever visited.  I don’t recall seeing any trash on the street.  It actually appeared as thought everyone in the city pitches in to keep the place looking nice.  Yes that is a homeless man walking around in a sleeping bag.  They all stayed to themselves in the city and didn’t bother me at all.  In fact I was quite impressed by their age.  Most of them were younger people.

Second, everything is larger than here in STL.  The sidewalks are twice as wide, the buildings go right up to the edge of each block, and speaking of city blocks, they seem to be larger as well. I think this has to do with the city being so far west. They just have more space to spread out!

The conference went well, we were the last presentation to go (for the day and the entire conference!)  We had a good turn out of about 50 people, all of them were paying attention to us the entire time.  

The next Fall SIGUCCS conference will be next year in St. Louis.  I encourage anyone working in higher education & technology to attend.  I plan on writing another paper for next year myself.

I’d talk more but I’m tired and need to get caught up.  The rest of my photos are embedded below and can be found on my flickr set.  Josh has some photos up on his flickr as well. His take on our adventure can be found on his blog (Parts 1,2,3,4,5)