Welcome to Portland, Keepin’ it Weird

Note to self: Thursday night is a bad night to go out if you have work the next morning… in general, that is, but sometimes one needs to make sacrifices. And sometimes those sacrifices are actually worth it, given the experience one has.

Wow I’ve been writing way too many formal documents.. So. Yesterday was my cousin’s birthday. The day I flew to Portland, he picked me up, and asked me if I’d be DD (not drunk driver, but designated driver…) for his birthday. At that point, I was well rested, happy, ready to start work, excited for new things. Didn’t even think about it, said sure, no problem.

Had I thought ahead of time, I would have realized that his birthday is on a Thursday, and he’d want to go out Thursday night. Seems normal, right. Here’s the catch: Thursday != Friday => If I go partying Thursday night, I still have work the next day, and like every other day of the week, I have to wake up at 6am.

So being DD.. means I got home at about 2:30am, went to bed at 3 and got about 3 hours of sleep, and then expected to function the next day. For those people that may not have jumped to this highly intuitive conclusion: BAD IDEA.
But I was willing to make a sacrifice for my cousin, and said, ok, I’ll survive.
And I think It was totally worth it. The experience I had was one synonymous to the title: a kind of taste of night life to Portland, OR, where I finally understand this bumper sticker: “Keepin’ Portland Weird”

Here is the highlight of last night’s adventures:

After going to a conveyor-belt sushi bar, another bar with a lot of game tables, and a dance club called “Dirty”, the token gay guy in our group said: “We need somewhere better,” not that we hadn’t bar-hopped enough already.

We leave the dance club, and walk down the street, passing an outside courtyard area that slightly caught our attention: an outdoor tent area with a “pen” of feathers and mattresses where they had hired three girls dressed in cheer-leader-like clothes who were clearly supposed to be emulating a pillow fight in the middle of a ring of guys.. however, there was no one in there and the girls were obviously bored out of their minds 😀 [weird point no 1]

So here comes [weird point no. 2-infinity] Walking further, i look ahead, and spot a sign in front of a club saying “Female Impersonators”.. think to myself out loud, “what the heck are female impersonators??” The guy i was walking next to just gave me an amused look, and laughed: “..You’ll see :D, ” Ah so that’s where we are going! o_O As we get closer, we start passing more and more people where their genders were highly questionable – in both directions.. females that looked quite convincing, but there was just something not right: large cheekbones, enormous bone structure, fake hair… It’s like spotting a phishing email: if only one thing looks wrong, it’s not necessarily a phish, only if multiple things just create a picture of, oh this can’t be true…and of course, there were slightly smaller stature male-looking females running around everywhere.

We get to the door, and approach the bouncer (I was of course fumbling around my purse trying to find my ID again.. I’ve never used the card so many times..). After checking it with a cursory glance, he takes this huge stamp and infects my right wrist with these words: “Great Dye Job!” LOL. Rainbows to the max..

And inside: dance floor, bar, coat check, tables… all normal.. but they might very well have been upside down, because the inhabitants of this bar completely turned what is considered normality in the normal society, completely upside-down. Groups of these female impersonators dancing like it was no tomorrow, as well as hipster-dressed males.. there was barely one human in there that looked “normal”..

Well, at least gay guy was happy 🙂 I just tried absorbing this scene, and truly enjoyed watching all the weirdness that Portland had offered in just 1 night…

Of course that doesn’t mean I didn’t hate myself the next morning, but the experience was definitely worth it.

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