Portland keep it weird video series#

Some of my fondest memories from Portland were when I was sitting in a park next to their house and listening to their jam sessions for free. The Man and my personal favorite, Modest Mouse. If you’re a fan of these music genres, you’ll likely recognize names like The Decemberists, The Dandy Warhols, Anatomy of a Ghost, The Shins and Portugal. I was quite happy about this, as it made all the local radio stations have really high-quality music. If you do, you’ll likely be publicly shamed. No Portlander ever listens to anything on the top 100 hit list. Along with those people also came a love for indie and punk music. That’s often why they get a lot of transplants (people from out of town) from California, where hipsterism as alternativism originated. Portland’s culture is heavily leftwing, LGBTQI-friendly and lover of all things punk. An emphasis on alternative and punk music Attending your first one is a rite of passage that can’t be missed, especially when you can drink a nice craft beer while watching.Ĭome one, come all – even with strange man buns, ripped jeans, and fully clashing textures that you couldn’t wear anywhere else. As lovers of the arts, it’s quite common on a Sunday to watch a “Poetry Slam” where local and national poets come to read their poems on stage and compete for the winning title. Some of the strangest theatre performances I’ve ever seen also take place in Portland. One of the largest Christmas festivals even showcases about 1000 new craft beers every year.Ĭhoose your plan All things arts, poetry and theater (the weirder, the better) There are mixes with every flavor imaginable, some good and some bad. But when you live in Portland, the typical bar has 20-30 rotating craft beers on tap at any given time (some dedicated places even have more than 200). By German standards, a lot of beer in Portland isn’t even beer anymore. “No, not at all” is what I got overwhelmingly as an answer. I went all over Portland interviewing Indian restaurant owners about their food traditions and asking if they needed to change their recipes for Portland’s taste. My senior thesis was about this topic (I studied Anthropology). They don’t try to “Americanize” the flavors of foods from foreign countries. Because Portlanders love all things natural, the food there is incredibly delicious and highly authentic. One thing that has permanently stayed with me after living in Portland is a huge love for good food combined with innovation. Portlanders love to be different, are proud of it and strive to become weirder by the minute. The city’s motto “Keep Portland Weird” makes a whole lot of sense when you hear about things like vegan strip clubs, a museum for vacuums, UFO festivals and the world’s largest Naked Bike Ride. And once you are familiar with the city’s flow, you cannot but think “Yep, that’s Portland”. One person was yelling bible verses, another walking their pig, a protest about the need for more organic food was taking place and a bunch of hipsters were blasting Nirvana. This one day I was sitting in the campus park area and, looking around me, I remember being transported into a different dimension. Being normal and conforming was considered suspicious. In fact, if you weren’t “weird” in some manner, you probably wouldn’t make a whole lot of friends there. It was truly a whole new level of “weird”. I moved to Portland from rural Oregon in 2011 for my studies and stayed there for over 5 years. It’s a city where the 90s trends are basically permanent and buying new things is frowned upon. Many people are vegans, obsessed with organic products and mostly wear either hemp or secondhand clothing.

Portland keep it weird video series#

While the series has gone on to exaggerate the weirdness of Portland in later seasons, the first episodes were pretty accurate. It featured a feminist bookstore, a mayor who swam to work and a couple seated at a restaurant where they learned the life story of the chicken they were about to eat. Portland, Oregon, USA became internationally recognized with the 2011 debut of the Netflix series “ Portlandia”.