Shopping

We went to Portland yesterday. It was a fun trip. A very fun trip. Audrey has been going through another Hello Kitty phase. This current one I'm pretty sure was brought on by peer influence, because Audrey did Hello Kitty pretty thoroughly when she was in Kindergarten/1st Grade and really hasn't wanted anything to do with it ever since. I didn't want to go to a mall, so I tried to find somewhere else that pushes sells Sanrio merchandise. I located an Asian market in Beaverton that sounded like a fun destination, and it exceeded any expectations we could have had. It had a bookstore. I am a bookstore junkie, but I would think that a bookstore where hardly anything is written in a language I can read and understand would be a pretty safe place. Nope. It was crammed with Japanese stationery products and CRAFT BOOKS. It was cuteness of an almost unbearable level. I'm afraid Audrey and I did a rush job on the rest of the Uwajimaya(and we actually bought nothing from their fairly extensive offering of Hello Kitty stuff,) because we got hung up in the Kinokuniya Bookstore. But the whole place was impressive. One thing I loved about the market was the fish counter, not just gawking at the tanks of dancing Dungeoness crabs, or the piles of sizeable octopus tentacles, but the smell, or lack of it. It was clean, it was fresh, and it didn't smell. We bought a couple of combo meals of chow mein, fried rice and various stir fries at the deli and ate in the car before moving on to do more shopping. I think we'll definitely go back.

We did some other more typical shopping: Portland Music, Target, Home Depot, that sort of thing. We went to Powell's City of Books, which is always big fun. But Audrey and I also ran into Sur La Table, which has a fairly new location in the Pearl District. We were seeking Valentine's baking goodies, and we found them:

We also picked up the current catalog, which listed OVER FIFTY Sur La Table stores, including three back in my old stomping grounds in Arizona. That's just WRONG. Not that I don't wish prosperity to awesome kitchen stores everywhere, but I remember when there was ONE Sur La Table, and you had to go to Seattle and climb a steep hill up from Pike Place Market to get there. I don't want Sur La Table to be common, like Crate & Barrel, where it's just a mark of another pretentious shopping district. Sigh. I would also like to preserve regional uniqueness---I think we're losing that. But I'll save that rant for another day, because I've got frosting to make: