Portland Redux

I wouldn't call it a bender, but a beer an hour for ten hours is something I haven't done since college. As soon as we began the drive down from Seattle, I started to crave some sweet, sweet Indian cart lunch special. There are a dozen things I remember about Portland, that are unique to Portland and are things I crave every now and then. The Indian cart special tops the list. Before we settled in for the long haul of drinking tall boys of Olympia and watching basketball, we hit the Indian cart for a "seven course" $5 meal that blows most other specials out of the water.

Funny thing about the "Taste of India" cart, is that four carts away is a "Real Taste of India" cart. Nobody knows which came first, but the specials are different, so I can only assume the two carts are rivals. It could be an ingenious marketing ploy to drum up business and interest, but I sort of doubt it.

Portland was all I imagined, and although I had planned on dropping by and visiting Stacey, everything else about the weekend was amazing. I was jonesing for some cheap beer, lots of basketball, running around outside on the PSU Astroturf field, Voodoo doughnuts, Ground Kontrol, Liar's dice, 4-player Pacman on the gamecube, hot tubbing...the weekend had it all! Andrew's complex has a racquetball court, and for some reason five of us thought bringing two soccer balls and kicking them around as hard as we could we be a good idea. My glasses got knocked off about two minutes into the mayhem and I went back to watching basketball--staying away from the ricochet death balls of fury.

Josh and I needed to be back in Seattle by noon on Sunday, and we weren't too confident in our ability to wake up early on Sunday morning, so we headed out late on Saturday. Nat didn't seem to be too pleased about only having one night of drinking in Portland, so I offered to drive Nat's car home so he could drink.

And then came THE BOOT.

I hadn't heard about "the boot" until about 8pm on Saturday night. I would have taken a picture of it if I had my camera, but try and imagine a clear plastic boot, capable of holding six pints of beer. Nat and Andrew finished off the first boot in about ten minutes.

By boot #5, the place was rocking. I would have loved to participate, but I was having a blast with the 4-player Pac-man. If you haven't played 4-player Pac-man on the game cube, you haven't lived. One person is Pac-man, using a game-boy advance to see the entire map, and the other three players are ghosts who can only see a portion of the map. When a few people have drank a boot each, the game turns from trying to win, to trying to juke the hell out of the ghosts, or sucker them into chasing you into a power-pellet, then going for the tri-fecta of eating all three ghosts. Good times, good times.