08/06/2014 Day 0. Portland, Oregon: not in the train yet

The adventure started in Portland! Everybody who has been to Portland airport would immediately recognize this carpet, which became famous!

My favorite place in Portland became (guess what) Union Station! We almost lived there for the first two days waiting for the train and exploring the city along the way.

Portland is officially the most hipster city in the U.S., and you can feel it just walking on the streets.  

The first ‘hipster’ place I visited was Powells Books, which can be best described as a city of books. You can spend there hours and hours looking through thousands (probably millions!) of different books, from technical to art literature sitting on one shelf.

By the way, Portland is also often called Rose City, because people say that the climate there is perfect for growing roses, and you can see it in almost every element of architecture.

 After all the MTP project participants gathered at the hub we headed to the Zusmans mansion, where we had our first amazing dinner and first equally amazing speakers, young entrepreneurs who were presenting their small businesses (right to the topic!). Among others, we learned about Britt Howard’s creative fashion enterprise ‘Portland Garment Factory’, which was started as a sewing shop and developed into the fashion house, the last project of which was the uniform for flight attendants of Michael Jordan’s private jet!