What You, a California Douchebag, Can Expect When You Move to Portland

Much has been said and written about how Californians break things when they leave California, particularly for Oregon. How dare they move somewhere they can afford! Well look at the bigshot from California, pumping his own gas! After a year here, I’m not actually sure just how prevalent this anti-CA attitude is. I barely see it. Is that because I live in the suburbs, where opinions are more likely to be hiding behind a smile? Possibly. I did move here with apocryphal stories in mind of cars with California plates getting their tires slashed, but I’ve parked at Fred Meyer multiple times and it never happened, and if it was going to happen it would have been there.

What can you expect then? Too much to talk about in one blog, so consider this a totally unfocused table of contents for future ones. Some wisdom nuggets for you:

• While house prices have been rising dramatically almost everywhere (Portland included), the median price here is still about $300k lower than any other major West Coast city, and running at about half the cost of LA and the Bay Area. There are a lot of beautiful old houses that have not been torn down and replaced with $1.5 million townhouses.

• Really old. This beauty was built in 1908 and is for sale. It probably didn’t have a microwave when it was new.

• “They” use the term Silicon Forest to describe the stretch of the Westside suburbs that include Nike, Intel, etc. While Silicon Forest isn’t quite as obnoxious a descriptor as Silicon Beach, it’s also nowhere near the Tesla-choked mayhem that the Westside of LA has become with the tech explosion. See above point about house values.

• There are food carts here instead of food trucks. Carts are better. They don’t travel every day, and you don’t need Instagram to track them down. They’re just there, clustered up in pods all over town. And there’s always a Hawaiian one.

• Speaking of, there are Hawaiian joints everywhere. No shortage of plate lunches here, and most are pretty good! What’s even better is that the proportion of plate lunch places to poke-only places seems to be an inverse of that relationship as it exists in LA, which is great since Mainland poke is trash. Poke at any gas station in Honolulu is better than the $16 poke bowl you’d find at some shiny place in Santa Monica, so I’m glad to see that up here if I want Hawaiian I can find good kalua pork at any number of places and ignore the poke altogether.

• Don’t bring an umbrella. It’s an even bigger tell that you’re from California than having CA license plates or saying “hella” all the time.

• Hearing people complain about traffic is adorable.

• The whole state is a speed trap. Beware. Also, they have red light cameras that will also nail you for speeding, and I’VE HEARD people get those tickets in the mail when caught going 11 mph over the limit.

Weather, politics, overrated donuts, which waterfalls to see and which to skip: all topics for another day. I’ve also got a dissertation coming on the liquor laws, so there’s that to look forward to.