Travelogue Chapter 1: Portland, Oregon, USA

Dear readers,

It would be great to compose a really witty and incisive account of my first full day in the US on my shambolic holiday, but sadly jetlag is not just the excuse of a few grouchy flyers, it is a condition which actually exists (whooda thunkit?) and from which i am now suffering. NOt so much that i sleep at the wrong time so much as i can only now sleep for four hours at a time and my
mind is now only geared to recognise if my body is tired or hungry and has dictated that i must be at least one of these at all times.

Now its not that i'm such a self-centred person that I imagine that you all want to hear what i ate for breakfast this morning, but it really is the little things that make you feel like you're on holiday. To say that the Danish was bigger than my face, is not only far from an exaggeration, but is in fact a great insult to this pastry, who if it could talk (and hey why not? This is
America!), would suggest that if only it had had teeth (like it had asked the wizard of oz for) it would have been it that ate me. I then picked up the local paper to see that a 15545 pound, five foot tall, rodent was the subject of a small front-page article. Naturally given the culture i now found myself in, i was expecting the article to read something like, "Mrs. Schneider (57, Idaho) made the discovery when she went into her garage (pronound garaujsh) to get some supplies from the Y2k stock-pile, which had remained the family's main source of nutrition when their apocalyptic predictions proved false..." But it actually turns out that the rodent in question is a native to prehistoric
Venezuela. So there you go, America hasn't always had the monopoly on 'big',that it currently enjoys.

From door to door was a twenty-two hour journey, and while i won't say that the welcome i received at the airport was worth it, the wealth of goodbyes I receieved before i left certainly was. So without naming names, thank you to all the lovely nice people who lent support, advice and farewells. For those of you I didn't tell (and let's face it, i didn't have a lot of time on my hands to do so), Gabrielle phoned to end our relationship, forty-eight hours before i left for Portland. This was, to put it mildly, unfortunate. NOnetheless, I'm staying with her at the moment and the situation is workable. We're not 'broken-up' exactly, but hairline fractures are visible from the initial collision. What can i tell you? She's complicated. I probably won't spend more than a week here now, I don't think. Heading to the East coast to catch up with DAve and Rob and see my favorite New-Yorkers.

For the moment I'll hang in here. I've actually had a pretty good time so far. Had a fun night out with Gabrielle's friends last night. I've little say, but that they were nice (and a just-nice amount of crazy) people and I had fun with them. Drank something called black bew which was nice. Kind of like Newcy Brown. It turns out they do have Amber Bock here - it's not just a Texas thing. Saw a billboard but haven't located it in a bar as yet. Living with a ferrit has proven a little strange though. it's a very docile creature, and does have its moments of playfullness, but, and honestly this is true, it is much smellier than a dog, and while it is considered by some to be 'cute,' I don't think i will ever, as long as i live, see benignity or normalcy in drinking water from a glass that a ferrit has stuck its head in and licked from or allowing it to hang out on your bed when it feels like.

For those of you who haven't met Gabrielle, she's lovely really - but eccentricities abound and recently have become quite
prominent. I'm sensing that this is not a holiday I will quickly forget, but suspect that I'll soon suppose many of its scenes were in a film I once saw, because the sheer madness and novelty of it all has left me with a peculiar detachment as if it were all fantasy. It's all just too strange to take seriously.

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All the best,
James.