Hello from Portland, Oregon

Hello from Portland, Oregon!

The Evolution science conference focusing on ecology and evolution was held in Portland this year, and I presented a poster on research I did last summer. We had to wake up by 6:45am everyday so that we could walk 30 mins to make it to the bus stop in time to catch the train. Most of my talks started around 8:45am and were done by 2:00pm, which meant Sam and I had plenty of time to explore the town.

We traveled to Powell’s bookstore—the largest bookstore in the nation.There were six aisles of young adult fiction, and we even found a couple aisles devoted to woodworking, furniture making and home building. Sam enjoyed looking through them!

We also stumbled across an AMAZING craft store called the Real Mother Goose Fine American Craft store. Pottery, sculptures, knickknacks and doodads, furniture and jewelry boxes, toys and jewelry—everything hand crafted from artists around the US. 

All of their furniture was beautiful and artistic. Definitely not a mass produced product. You could see how much time it took to make each piece. 

Look at the detail of this chess board! Crazy!

Sam was in HEAVEN, and (shh) took bunches of pictures to inspire him when he starts woodworking. We are really excited get started.

We also stopped by the zoo, which was a lot of fun. We saw this guy almost immediately upon entering, and he wanted to welcome us to the zoo.

The best parts were definitely the cute baby monkeys (smaller than the length of your hand), the bathing sea otters, and the elephants that were playing in their pond. It was scorching hot outside, so they were having fun swimming around and dunking each other.