Because The Best Things in Life Are Free

My favorite thing about traveling is the well of memories you are left with, once you return home. Some memories make for funny stories to tell your friends. Some are easily forgotten. Some make you smile and reminiscence years after the fact. Some are profound experiences that impact your future life in some way.

Memories make for great travel souvenirs—they are generally free and abundant (if you are open to the experience). To keep the memories alive, some people might write about what they saw and places they visited. Some people dig a bit deeper and write about what these places made them feel. For the literarily challenged, this is where physical souvenirs come in.

For X amount of money, you can buy a trinket/bauble/item that will remind you of your trip to (insert place name). Jetsetters will often have something they collect and look for in every trip. I have an aunt who collects little house figurines. My mother collects magnets and bags.

I have this filled-to-bursting little cabinet where I proudly display my collection of trinkets from around the world. On paper, my little trinkets are my official travel souvenirs. In reality, my favorite souvenirs are random FREE things that I’ve accumulated over the years:

• Free brochures from most of the places I’ve visited;
• A woven bracelet (and accompanying blessing) given to me by a Lao Buddhist monk;
• Dried red maple leaves from Japan;
• A bottle of holy water from the church used to film the wedding scene in The Sound of Music;
• Bright yellow leaves from a tree in Korea and
• A piece of cloth used by an Indian artisan who demonstrated to us traditional fabric wood-block printing.

My tour group for my India trip was taken to one of those cheesy gift shops that travel companies often take you to. First up was a demonstration of how they used vegetable dye and wooden blocks to decorate pieces of fabric.

First, dye was applied to a pattern made on a wooden block. Then the block is pressed into a piece of cloth to make an impression (pictured right). After letting it sit for a while, the cloth is dipped in some chemicals. A chemical reaction occurs and the colors on the pattern are transformed (pictured left)! At this point, all the people in my group exclaimed a collective, "Wow!" I started clapping and then asked the artisan (through a serious of hand gestures) if it would be okay for me to take his picture. He smiled at me, agreed and a mini-photo shoot ensued.

I went into the store and shopped for a while but on my way back to the bus, the artisan came up to me, smiled again and presented me with the piece of cloth that he used to demonstrate wood block pattern printing. I thanked him profusely, happy that I could use the lone Hindi word that I had in my arsenal:

dhan'yavāda - धन्यवाद (thank you)

I still have this piece of cloth to this day. It is tucked into my favorite travel journal.

We keep souvenirs for sentimental reasons. More often than not, they are not bought or kept for whatever their innate utility is. They are kept to commemorate an event or to look back at a memory. They are a physical manifestation of our memories, a tangible effort to keep the memories with you.

When I look at this souvenir, I do not think of the cloth. I do not think of the dye that was used. Nor do I think of the chemical reaction that magically transformed it to another color.

I think of the artisan who gave it me. I think of our effort to communicate using hand gestures. I think of his dye stained hands. But most of all I think of his lovely smile and how it made my day.