Free Portland
Portland for free? For freeee? I would shriek my old neighbor, for free they’re not even gonna give you a kick nowadays.
I heard her before, but this time I am set to find out all kinds of activities that one can do for free in Portland as well as a lot of things that one can have for free.
To start, there are plenty of parks where one can play basketball or tennis without shelling out one penny. Last summer, some friends visited me from Europe, and they were stunned by the fact that we don’t have to pay a dime to play tennis. In Europe they have to pay for playing tennis: 10 euros an hour, nearly 15 dollars and that in the cheapest places, my friends told me. Well, here in Portland we can have that for free. Just buy your rackets which you can find for nearly free at any Goodwill store, by the way, and you are set to become the next Agassi or Kournikova, for free.
If you want free food, you can have that too in Portland. Just go to any Zupan, or Wild Oats market and, by the time you are finished tasting their cheeses, their gourmet bruschetta toppings, their cold cuts, their wines, you have had dinner, and what a dinner!
After dinner do you want entertainment? There’s plenty of that free too. Reed College offers, very often, concerts of classical music that are free to anyone. Just check with them. Another college that offers free music is Warner Pacific on SE Division and 69th Avenue.
The Old Church, which by the way is not longer a church but an event hall, downtown, offers a free concert every Wednesday at noon. Just put your lunch in a brown bag and off you go. They are called the brown bag concerts, and they always feature all kinds of musicians and even opera singers.
Recently they have held concerts also at night followed by receptions. At these receptions, they offer gourmet cheeses and wines, veggies and fruits to please any palate, all kinds of chips and dips of organic nature, not to offend anyone’s stomach.
PSU is also offering freebies sometimes. Check with the music department at Lincoln Center, and you will find out about all the concerts performed by the music school graduates. Those concerts are, you guess, free.
You don’t like classical music? No problem! Get thee to the library downtown and go up to the music room, where you can hear anything for free from the most sophisticated baroque music to the newest hard rock and rap pieces that send teenagers in a frenzy. All you have to do is find the CD or the tape and wear the headphones, and you are in for a lot of free entertainment.
Free medical care? You cannot believe this? Well, this is America: no free medicine for anyone! Wrong! At SE Clinton and 19th Avenue, MD doctors will take care of anyone’s illness for free at their homeopathic clinic. Homeopathy is that branch of medicine that cures illness with a small dose of the same (homos is Greek for same) agent that causes the illness and it works. In Germany and all over Europe many doctors use this practice.
The library doesn’t offer only books and annoying scholastic tomes, but also magazines, just about all the ones that are being published in America and even some foreign ones. I have already talked about the free music, and that is not all; you can even borrow art from the library. Let us say you have a party with important people and you want to impress them and show them how sophisticated and educated you are, you go to the library and borrow all the prints you want from the most famous painters in the world and you can instantly transform your dumb house into an intellectual paradise.
You want to know about books but don’t want, or you don’t have the time to, read?
Powell’s Books on 10th and Burnside, as well as other bookstores in town, offers writer readings, where you not only get to know a book without reading it, but you can also shake hands with famous writers and poets, all for free.
On Sundays just about all churches give out free breakfast complete with fruit, doughnuts and coffee and many different kinds of tea. If you go to the Holy Trinity Orthodox Greek Church on Glisan and 35th , you can even have an organic breakfast with wheat kernels and yogurt.
Check out the churches for concerts too. They often host full orchestra concerts inside their sanctuaries, and you may attend for free.
In summer you can swim for nearly free at many community centers such as Montavilla and Creston Park. The cost of swimming is a few dollars, which I consider a freebie compared to the prices of swimming pools in Europe, as reported by my friends.
Are you so bored one day that you wouldn’t know were to turn for solace and human contact? Go to NE Alberta Street. That is where art is down to earth and the artists really human. While in the Pearl District you never meet the artists, and the art is kind of stuck up, Alberta is a breath of fresh air for many reasons. You find great art yes, but also art of a more humble kind, like jewelry and clothing and walking sticks, made by artists with an eye to please the common public, not just rich art collectors. Visiting all the artist coops is an adventure and a pleasure, and you can go home with some nice piece that is not only functional but also beautiful.
At the Saturday Market, under the Burnside Bridge, you usually find entertainment for free for your kids provided by various clowns, puppeteers, Elvis impersonators, and so forth. That is every Saturday and every Sunday from March to December.
If you care to check, all throughout the year there are Festivals of this or that nature where food vendors will offer a taste of their goods. These are people who make the food, and sell it on their own, without intermediaries, so you not only find the freshest quality at the best prices, but you also get to eat enough for free to fill you up for a dinner, because all vendors offer
free samples of each one of their products.
Theater is expensive? You bet, but all the same I have seen just about all the plays by Shakespeare for free last summer in all the parks around town and they weren’t shabby either. The costumes were great, and the actors all future Hollywood stars in my book.
Want to dance? That too is offered for free too. At the Polish Church in Overlook Park on Interstate Avenue, every Friday they have free dancing. They dance Polka, Mazurka, and the Polonaise, which is the Polish Waltz, but better.
Other dance groups such as contra-dance, Irish dance, and so forth also offer free classes before every dance.
All that I have described until now is going on all year round.
During the holiday season, starting from Halloween until Christmas and New Year’s Eve, one cannot even count the many free events. Pumpkin patches, haunted houses, free candies and chocolates are all over town. The fun continues until the new year with free concerts, pageants, free theatre shows, for the joy of children and grownups alike.
Last , but not least, senior citizen can have a free lunch in any community center, all year round, offered by Loaves and Fishes. All you have to do is sign up and be 65 or over.
