Taken by the Wind » Wacky Souvenirs

Would You Buy These? The Hawaiian Souvenir Edition

Reannon Muth — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 20:59:45 +0000

From the ‘utterly useless souvenir’ category comes the following: scented clocks, clothing for your wine bottle, leis made out of dog-biscuits and a duster shaped like a hula dancer.

I can only imagine the tough time someone must have had trying to come up with ways to market these…Judging from the dust that was collecting on some of them (I took all of the photos in an ABC store in Waikiki) it doesn’t look they were very successful.

‘Course, their products would probably fare far better if they hired me to write their advertising slogans for them…Dontchya think?

Scented Flower Clocks

Tired of your clock smelling like plastic? Then why not buy one that’s not only shaped like a Hawaiian tropical flower but smells like one too! Next time you have friends over and they say: “Hey, that’s a nice flower perfume you’re wearing!” you can impress them by saying, “Nah, it’s not me you’re smelling, it’s my clock!”

Wine Bottle Outfits

You’ll never have to worry again about your friends thinking you’re cheap for bringing that Cisco Strawberry Fruit wine to their dinner party. Just dress the bottle up in it’s snazzy hula girl costume and everyone will be too impressed by how classy and clever you are to notice the $2.95 price tag.

Hula Duster

Your roommate may think you’re crazy for using a barbie doll to clean the lamp shade, but you’ll be having too much fun to care. Hula Duster is the fun way to clean! It also multi-functional! It works great as a back-scratcher and should you find yourself stranded somewhere without a shovel and in need of digging a giant hole in the mud, The Hula Duster makes for a handy Hula Digger too.

Dog bone leis make great gifts and stalking stuffers. Unlike flower leis, they won’t wilt or die and they’ll stay fresh for so long, you could practically leave them buried in your backyard and they’d still retain that beautiful Hawaiian, dog-bone smell. The leis come in three varieties of scents: Chicken Liver, Smoked Pig and Spam.

Would You Buy These?

Reannon Muth — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 23:34:02 +0000

These were for sale in the tourist market in Granada, Nicaragua.

I don’t want to make fun of these too much because obviously a lot of time and care was put into them. I mean, just look at the detail in the man’s Tom Selleck moustache. And the artist even thought to add a touch of realism by adding the a trash can next to each toilet (in Nicaragua, toilet paper isn’t flushed, it’s thrown in the trash).

I imagine the artist’s conversation with the souvenir vendor went something like this:

Vendor: None of the tourists are buying your volcano paintings. Come up with something more interesting.

Artist: How about a painting of a toucan? Or a man sleeping in a hammock on the beach?

Vendor: NO! No…that’s been done too many times before.

Artist: Okay, I know. How about a painting of a man sleeping in a hammock, on a beach with a toucan flying over his head? And a volcano in the background?

Vendor: No! I said that we need something interesting! Something funny! The tourists like to laugh. They will buy it if it’s funny.

Artist: (thinking a moment) Okay…how about a man sitting on a toilet? Everybody likes a good ‘man sitting on the toilet’ joke. It’ll be your best selling souvenir, I promise.

Vendor: (hesitating) Alright…We’ll try it. But this better not be another one of your crappy ideas!

Vacation Souvenirs: Why Do We Buy Them?

Reannon Muth — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 05:29:00 +0000

I don’t buy souvenir’s when I travel because frankly, I don’t see the point. Do I really need some tacky fridge magnet shaped like a sombrero to remind me that I went to Mexico? Um, no. Thank you. And ditto with hula girl dashboard dolls from Hawaii, Nevada license plate hand bags from Las Vegas or kangaroo back scratchers from Australia.

I mean, what are you expected to do with that lava rock you pocketed from that volcano in Costa Rica? Store it in a keepsake box with your seashell collection from Bali? Frame and mount it on the wall? Do you buy “I love (insert random city)” t-shirts and keychains because it brings you a sense of vacation closure? Does it make you feel better about heading home to Jersey City now that you’ve taken a little piece of your vacation with you (even if it’s only in the form of an Elvis Presley Snowglobe from Graceland)?

Or is that postcard collection really just an adult version of an eight-year-old’s recess sing-song “Na na na nana! Na na na nana! I went to Aruba and yooooou didn’t!”?

Is souvenir shopping just a subconscious attempt at making ourselves feel superior over our friends and family?

I recently read an article about how jetsetters are being replaced by netsetters, which is a term coined to describe 20-somethings who travel mainly for the opportunity to brag about it on facebook, twitter or their travel blogs.

This quote from The Daily Mail describes it nicely,

“When you’re sat at your desk on a rainy Monday morning in Britain, there’s nothing quite like seeing social netsetters showing off their photos on their profiles, with smug grins on a sun-kissed beach or near an international beauty spot. It’s clear people just love showing off online.”

So I suppose before I congratulate myself on the fact that my bedroom is delightfully tacky-souvenir free, I should first consider this blog, which is perhaps…

the biggest vacation souvenir of all.

So what do you think? Do you collect souvenirs? Are you guilty of being an occasional netsetter? And where do you draw the line between well-intentioned travel blogging and self-absorbed navel-gazing?

The Patriotic Tattoo

Reannon Muth — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 16:01:00 +0000

This past 4th of July (America’s Independence Day) I met a man who’d had his telephone area code tattooed to his shoulder.

I was dumbfounded when he told me this. We were sitting around a bonfire in Santa Cruz, California when the topic of tattoos came up.

“But…Why?!” was all I could think of to say in response. I couldn’t imagine how anyone could be so infactuated with their home town or city to have the numerical code permanently inked onto their body.

But apparently he wasn’t an anomaly. Everyone present at the bonfire had either known or heard of someone who’d gotten one and a google search brought up a few dozen web-searches on the subject (although most of them were related to prisons or gangs).

I’ll have to be honest here and admit that I was pretty quick to judge him on that one. I even turned and whispered to my friend: “God, that’s so American.”

Which is really funny considering that I myself have a similar tattoo. No, it’s not my area code or zip code but it might as well be for all that it represents. Because I have a tatoo of a map.

Yep, a map.

A map of the Hawaiian Island chain. I don’t have a photo of it but it looks something like this:

I know that representing your birthplace in a tattoo is the same whether it takes the form of a map or a numerical code, but believe it or not, I never made the link between the two until a full three days later. I guess I just thought that hailing from a tropical paradise was way cooler than say, Sacramento (obviously, I’ve got a snobby streak in me). I thought that made my tattoo meaningful and nostalgic whereas his was just tacky and unsophisticated.

It seriously irks me though to think that I’m one of those people. You know, those insanely patriotic types that get drunk in some biker bar and wake up with this on the back of their heads:

But really, when you think about it, how am I any different?

Study Examines Role of Tattoos in Construction of Personal Identity is an interesting article about how people use tattoos as a way of establishing “permanence, meaning and stability” in a fragmented and unpredictable society.

The researchers claim that because we live in a world of “rapid and unpredictable change”; in a world where people frequently move, change jobs and even spouses, that tattoos provide an “anchor” to the past and a form of identity.

That made me think a lot of about the aspects of our personal histories that we use to define ourselves. We all do it. It’s a part of human nature to roll-play and get wrapped up in finding new ways to label ourselves.

“I’m an American”
“I’m a teacher”
“I’m a travel-holic”
“I’m a fan of 80′s pop music”.

I think that sometimes it’s comforting to cling to the few things that we know as absolute truths, especially when we live day to day in a bubble of uncertainty. But at what point is it unhealthy to base our sense of self and self-worth on a point on a map?

Photo courtesy of Giana G’s Flickr Photostream

Where do we draw the line between being proud of our roots to letting that be the end-all definition of who we are?

I’ll end this post with a photo of Angelina Jolie’s latest tatoo. She had the latitude and longitude birthplace locations of all six of her children inked to her upper arm.

What do you think? Do you have or would you ever get a patriotic tattoo?

The Souvenir Tattoo

Reannon Muth — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 10:32:00 +0000

Photo by Monocular Jack

One of my old co-workers once had the name and image of the cruise ship we worked on tattooed to his upper arm. We were on Nassau in the Bahamas and he was drunk on this sudden, new found love for the cruise line industry as well as just plain drunk from two many tequila shots at the crew bar.

Last I heard he’s since gotten an office job on land somewhere in the suburbs of upstate New York. I wonder what he thinks about his mini-blue cruise ship tattoo now?

I’m not against souvenir tattoos in general (after all, I’ve got two of them!) and I actually like the one pictured above (although I’d never get something quite so large) but it makes me wonder: What is it about traveling that makes people want to immortalize the experience by undergoing the painful and expensive process of scarring themselves irreversibly?

Photo by Twiggy

Photo by Juan Pablo Giusepponi

For me, that answer lies somewhere in my fear of change. I find that right before I’m about to make a scary leap of faith into uncertainty, I’ll get this sudden urge to do something risky, challenging, frightening or drastic, like bungee jump, chop off all of hair or get something pierced or tattooed.

In a weird way, it makes whatever transition I’m about to face a lot less frightening. Leaving my job at Disney World and moving to New York, for example, seemed like a walk in the park after facing my fear of needles and getting my tongue pierced (fortunately, I came to my senses a few months later and took it out! So not classy).

But it also has to with nostalgia and the desire to preserve a cherished experience, as well. When I was in Germany, my best friend at the time and I got tattoos on the same place on the right side of our lower backs. We’d decided that our friendship, which we’d decided was already sealed by fate, should also be sealed by blood. We called ourselves ‘tattoo buddies’, (“We’ll be friends for life!”). Ironically, ‘life’ when I was 22, meant the following six months. I haven’t seen or spoken to my tattoo buddy since I last visited France, almost four years ago.

But I like the fact that wherever I go in the World, I’ll carry a little part of my Germany experience with me, even if it’s only the ink from a tiny back alley tattoo parlor in Leipzig.

Sure, I’ll probably regret it when I’m 80, and my red hibiscus tattoo has been so badly stretched out and faded that it looks like a painful welt or rash. But like Carlos, my tattoo artist in Japan told me, “A naked, old person is ugly with or without tattoos. At that point, you won’t care what you look like.”

Sometimes though, I think that there are a probably a lot less painful, less expensive ways to honor a memorable trip or time abroad. A picture or a postcard might not last as long, but it won’t be something you’ll regret as soon as that ‘vacation high’ wears off. I think I often fall easy victim to the thrill of a new experience and feel this impulsive need to get tattooed, just as I feel the impulsive need to buy a collection of hand-painted bobble head creatures in Mexico or a necklace made out of Yak teeth in India.

I think this dangerous ‘impulse tat’ habit I’ve been developing, is something that I definitely need to work on. After all, I wouldn’t want to ever rue the day I got suckered into getting something as cheesy as a Japanese cherry blossom etched onto my ankle, (oops! Too late…). Or how about the ever classy and sophisticated subway map on the stomach tattoo?