08/08/2014 Day 2. Seattle, Washington

Right after our train arrived at Seattle station, we were headed to WeWork, a cool coworking space where entrepreneurs work on their individual projects. The awesome thing is they always have an opportunity to share their ideas and receive other businessmen's opinions. What I liked the most at WeWork was an incredible atmosphere of the place where people are happy, because they have an opportunity to do what they like! The interior design helps a lot, I bet :)
The video of a tour at the offices is available here.

After the working session at WeWork, I went to explore the city of Seattle! The first thing I saw was, of course, the famous Space Needle! You can actually see it from any place in the city.

The second famous place in Seattle is its huge farmer's market right at the waterfront. The view from there is amazing and I bet the food is too.

 By the way, here we ran into our famous chefs from the train Christian and Simone representing C.C.O. Consulting Group, apparently we were going to have something very local and very tasty for dinner :)

People here do not lack a sense of humor in Seattle!

 The first Starbucks opened exactly here in 1971. You can still see the old logo (yes, the mermaid has the boobs!) People say it's pretty fancy inside: walnut tables and leather seats, but the line is so long, you can even get close enough to the window to see what exactly is inside there. They do have a Starbucks signature mugs that can be bought only here.

Project time!

Seattle is the best place ever for my project of craziest start-ups and small business ideas, unfortunately, I had only a couple of hours and visited only 2 from my 3 page list of those.

The first one is an old-fashioned paper retailer located inside the market (which doesn't make it easier to find it). The shop specializes in vintage (let's be honest, just old) advertising, posters, maps, magazines, and newspapers. You might think, why people would buy old paper stuff? 

 Old Seattle Paperworks opened up in 1976, when its founder and owner John Hanawalt, 'a lifelong obsessive compulsive collector', was only 22. Since then, it has been attracting collectors from the whole world and just curious tourists. The filming inside is prohibited, so are the photos. Too bad, I saw that only when my camera shifted to this sign when exiting the shop :) See video about this magical place later!

Another not even a bit less weird Seattle small business was this steampunk-looking food truck, called Maximus-Minimus. The coolest thing about it is the truck itself, there is actually a bunch of them surfing Seattle and you'll never know their exact location. I was lucky enough just to run into it in the middle of downtown. The metal pig serves some of the best pork sandwiches in the Northwest. 1% of sales goes to Flagship Foundation, which helps kids make healthy food choices, which kind of makes me think that the food truck itself uses only pure products for its sandwiches.

Whitefish, Montana tomorrow!

08/07/2014 Day 1. Portland and the long awaited train

 My day started at 6 am with the amazing view over Columbia River Gorge, which constitutes the border between Oregon and Washington State.

On the first day we had a very comprehensive tour of Portland given by the city’s first lady Nancy Hales. We learned about the services of an incredible organization called Portland Parks & Recreation, which maintains all of the city’s numerous parks and green streets and is in charge of Pioneer Courthouse Square. This place is so special because it changes its ‘face’ 340 times a year on average: it hosts all kind of events, from flowers festival to India festivals to farmers markets. The day before we arrived there was a soccer field there!

Our field trip continued on Portland aerial tram, which brings you to Oregon Health & Science University, providing a stunning view over Portland and specifically its bridges. One of them is a replica of Boston’s Zakim Bridge, what really surprised me. Later on I saw another bridge like this on the way to Seattle, which made me think that it’s not that the Bostonian Zakim Bridge isn’t just unique, there is plenty of such bridges all over the U.S.

The only thing Portland might not be proud of is the traces of segregation, specifically of African-Americans, that are still very noticeable. The African-American family would have a lot of trouble when buying a house or finding jobs in Portland, OR, and this explains why there are NO African-American families living there. This whole story made me think that sometimes our society is incredible hypocritical: we fight for human rights, women's rights, gays' rights... and end up with a city where African-Americans are not welcome? Just because of their skin color? Excuse me, Portland, but that's INSANE!!! And all the advantages of this clean and beautiful city were torn apart by this only fact.

Project time!

As I mentioned before, my project would cover coolest startups and small businesses you can imagine in all the cities we are going to visit.

Portland was a perfect place to start! The first startup I went to was Hotlips Pizza, pizzeria that purchases locally-grown ingredients, uses waste heat from its pizza ovens to heat water, and makes deliveries in electric cars. Should I add that their pizza is 100% organic and incredibly tasty?

Organic plates:

Check out the videos from Hotlips Pizza, leather shop Will and salt and chocolate shop The Meadow later.

And, finally today we got on the train!!!!!

Check out the first video from the train!

What is especially great about MTP project is speakers that we have on the train. Today it was Andy Rabens from the U.S. State Department who talked about global youth and Robert Reid, travel journalist for National Geographic, who was speaking about the whole notion of travelling, here are his most interesting quotes:

-       Train is the most social type of travel

-       Travel is not a contest, it doesn’t matter how many stamps you have in your passport (totally agree with this one)

-       Travel is a rare opportunity for us to play

-       We have limited time to travel, and it’s all about fun

-       Travel = Curiosity + Communication.

I feel like the guy who visited most countries of this world should be right J

Photo: Convo with Jack Bienko from US Small Business Administration. Photo credits: Patrick Dowd

Apart from speakers, we have a group discussion every day. What we do is just talking for an hour or so about the leadership, contemporary problems, or how different people and countries deal with these problems, etc. Today I told my group mates that I enjoy listening more rather than speaking because it allows me to absorb more information. It might seem quite egocentric, but I feel like that’s the way you learn the most, just talk to new people, and you will learn so much new stuff.

The new story about Seattle coming up tomorrow!

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!