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I am falling in love with Portland. When visiting family there recently, I was so intrigued by the place, I felt wildly compelled to rate the entire city as "sincere," but then I asked myself, is that possible? Well, let's examine the evidence. First of all, it's beautiful: Mt. Hood shines down upon the city from the East, pine forests abound, and lush, green streets wind along the hillsides. Second, a very vibrant scene dominates each of its downtown districts. From what I understand, and a very limited understanding it is, Portland is divided into four sections, SW, SE, NW and NE, with the Willamette River dividing it by East and West. The portions of the city I visited, Southwest's very hip downtown with great little restaurants and vintage shops surrounded by neighborhoods of cozy, old houses, particularly in the Hawthorne District; and Southeast's downtown, a little more upscale, including an area called the Alphabet District with more cool shops and slighter nicer restaurants, made me just want to pack up and move there. (There's also a business district in Portland where one finds high-rises and buildings of quite notable architecture but a somewhat colder street life.) 

One day during our visit, we spent several hours at the Saturday Market in downtown SE and what a scene that was! I mean, the rows and rows of local vendors and their crafts was all very nice, but it was the peripheral hangers-on that really gave it character. Hippies, young and old, swarmed the area, strumming guitars, crazily gyrating to real or imagined music, urging petitions to legalize pot, and, at times, overwhelming the delicious smells of the food vendors with their obvious aversion to deodorant. Could I live with all that crunchiness? Suffice it to say there are a lot of very "natural" people in Portland; it is, after all, environmentally the greenest city in the U.S. Which brings me to my third point: Portlanders are friendly - almost to a fault.