I was in Vancouver, Washington last week. Not to be confused with Vancouver, British Columbia, which aside from being in Canada, is a totally different town. Vancouver is a suburb of Portland Oregon.

It’s a study in contrasts, this is an area, one time known as “Silicon Forrest”

It's is a haven of tech industries, and a place where people value nature.
Where people drive big trucks, and complain about pollution.
Where they urge people to recycle,
and yet where timber is one of the biggest industries.

It’s an outdoors loving kind of place,
yet a place also desperately trying encourage a new-urbanistic lifestyle.

One can see the results of new urbanism a revitalized downtown, efforts to control sprawl, and encouraging mass transit to reduce car dependence.

Finally Portland is a place with a memorial to Executive Order 9066, and the Bill of Rights. Yet, I didn’t get the idea that Portland was all that diverse. I didn’t see all that many Asians, at least not in the city center. The downtown Chinatown appeared rather dreary, as if the city was trying, but somehow hasn’t managed a revitalization yet. Portland has about the same percentage of Asians as the Boston area so I would imagine that there’s another Chinese community somewhere in one of the suburbs, where one would find the requisite 99 Ranch Market.

Going to the Portland area this year a couple of times reminds me, of how my life might have been. I think what might have been had I moved here after college.

Graduating from college I had an enviable resume. With internships at Intel and Micron, as well as solid academic work, I had interviewed in Texas, and the Portland are, as well as multiple times in Los Angeles. But instead I chose to go to Massachusetts. And my life was changed. It wasn’t a wrong choice, or even a bad choice. My friends say don’t look back at what might have been, it can only disappoint you.

At the time I couldn’t really tell the difference between working for Intel and working for DEC. Maybe later I would get my prejudices against working in a real factory, after working for DEC. But essentially I say the reason I went, because it seemed like a strange place to me, and quite far away as well. The job looked like it paid decently, and I was pretty much fresh out of college.