This summer I happened to get reasons to go to Portland and Halifax, for about one week each. Portland was for ACL HLT 2011 (less catchily, the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies), and Halifax was for my sister's wedding.

Portland

To get to Portland (there is also a full photo set) I took the Amtrak train. I took the option of a bus to Seattle and then a train from there, but the train actually goes all the way of you pay a little more. It was a nice way to travel; the bus was a little cramped, but the train is roomy and has wifi. There are also intermittent nice views along the way.

I stayed at a hostel in northwest, which was very slightly out of the way but still not far from the central area and the downtown hotel the conference was at. One of the street car lines is free in the central area, so usually I would just take that for most of the distance from the hostel to the conference. The transportation seemed really good at least in that area, but I didn't actually try any other parts of it. The streets are mostly in a regular grid so that navigation is easy. In northwest, the streets are also conveniently named in alphabetical order going north. The city is divided into quadrants by the river and Burnside Street. I didn't see much of the part of the city east of the river, just northwest and southwest. The road infrastructure around the city also seemed impressive, especially with a lot of bridges and attached raised roads, but I don't know much about that that part works.

I spent most of my time at the conference, so I didn't have much time to look around. However, Portland's attraction seems to be mostly the social environment with all its restaurants and bars, rather than any major tourist destinations. Fortunately Ann from my lab has lived in Portland, so she could give the rest of us advice on where to go.

Portland has quite a bit of street food, which is from little mobile huts which set up in rows (I think this is roughly the same style as Vancouver is starting to get, except that as far as I know we don't have any large groups of them yet). It seemed quite reasonably priced, too.

Portland also has Powels, claimed to be the largest independent new and used bookstore in the world. It is quite impressive; the main location takes up an entire block, and there is another annex location nearby. It takes a bit of practice to navigate in since there are several colour coded rooms on different levels, all filled fairly densely with shelves.

I had one whole day free after the conference, so I went for a long walk. The main part of the walk was up to Washington Park and the Hoyt Arboreum behind it. I had originally been looking for views of the city, and even though I never really found them it was still a nice walk. I also went over to look at the cable car (aerial tramway) line to the Oregon Health & Science University campus. I believe this is something like one of two commuter cable cars in North America. I didn't actually go up, but it and the visible parts of the campus were somewhat dramatic.

Halifax

In Halifax (there is also a full photo set) I had a bit more time to look around between wedding and family things. I was staying with my family at the University of King's College dorms, on the corner of the Dalhousie campus. The wedding was at the King's chapel, and my sister and her husband live in the residential area next to campus.

Halifax feels tiny and relatively old (at least in the central areas). Downtown and the area out to Dalhousie are a nice size to walk around in, and there is a good variety of restaurants and shops. A lot of the more drinking oriented places have tables outside along the sidewalks, which made the streets more lively.

There are some older fortifications around the city. The largest (as far as I know) is Fort George on Citadel Hill, which is in the middle of the city and was in use from the eighteenth century through World War II. There are some smaller fortifications elsewhere around the harbour. Halifax seems to have a larger military presence than Vancouver, presumably because the Eastern Fleet headquarters is still there and also more or less in the middle of the city.

I took the ferry over to Dartmouth, mostly as a way to see more of the harbour. Dartmouth is less interesting to visit than Halifax, but seemed nice enough otherwise. There are a bunch of more touristy harbour trips which I didn't try. This includes an amphibious vehicle which does a tour that goes out into the harbour and then onto land to look around the city (or maybe in the other order). It is an interesting idea, but somewhat jarring for anyone not on the tour; sometimes I'd be walking along a nice old looking street and suddenly the giant amphibious truck would show up with megaphone commentary.

I'd been hoping to get a chance to go out to Peggy's Cove, which seems to be the main thing to see near the city, but my family never got around to organizing a vehicular expedition and I didn't want to pay for a tour (the public bus doesn't go that far out). We did go to Fisherman's Cove on the Dartmouth side, which is a smaller place trying to set up as a tourist destination. It wasn't too exciting (but might be more active at other times), but it was nice as a way to get out of the city and closer to the Atlantic.

In other walking around I went out Point Pleasant Park, which had some of the smaller fortifications and was also closer to the ocean. I also went around the Northwest Arm to see Dingle tower, which turned out to be under renovation and covered in tarps. The walks were a chance to see more of the local environment and also the great little squirrels.