Weird Souvenirs
Beware when you visit Egypt not to buy any of these lead-weight fake statues
All I had in the way of weird souvenirs, I told Montreal’s Smart Shopper Sandra Phillips, was the 75-million-year-old Hadrosaur shinbone I bought in Drumheller, Alta., and the bit of turf I'd smuggled from a Donegal bog. But her Montreal living room (which probably glows in the dark) was like an annex of American Museum of Natural History.
There was a snaggle-toothed alligator from a Louisiana bayou with the name of the hunter dangling from its jaw. A Mexican swamp turtle. A sabre-spined Guadeloupean blowfish (too hazardous to dust except with a vacuum cleaner). Some 7-foot-long Texas longhorns, two mismatched New Brunswick buck antlers, a few rams' horns. And a Wyoming buffalo skull.
There were rain sticks made of dried cacti by South American Indians and a sword and helmet worn by Don Quixote in the Broadway play Man of la Mancha (which you'd need to protect yourself if you ever traversed her living room in the dark). Coyote, caribou and red-fox tracks - preserved in clay - marched up the bathroom walls.
With the help of her indulgent husband, Sandra had gone to the ends of the Earth to shop for these decorator items. (And every year kids from the Westpark School in Dollard des Ormeaux where she lives come on class trips to see them.)
Since 1986, Sandra has walked thousands of miles scouting bargains for her shopping columns in The Montreal Gazette and her book Smart Shopping Montreal. But I was more interested in her shopping expeditions abroad. Finding things like Texas longhorns and killer blowfish was one thing. Getting them through customs was quite another.
The blowfish lamp
As Sandra told it, she and husband, Stan had been browsing in a lamp store in Guadeloupe when Sandra saw the blowfish. It was huge and conveniently dead. It looked like a balloon from hell, with spikes like vampire fangs and a mouth curled into a nasty sneer. The lightbulb shining through its translucent skin and the electric cord hanging out of its tail made it look pretty stupid, but Sandra had never seen a blowfish so awesome, and she had to have it in any form.
By the time she and Stan left the store it was rush hour in Basse-Terre. They hopped a local bus back to their hotel. They were sitting on the bus, Stan with the blowfish wrapped in newspaper on his lap. But every few minutes, more islanders jammed onto the bus and the spikes of the blowfish began digging their way out of the newspaper wrapping and into Stan's stomach.
"When we got back to the hotel,'' Sandra said, "Stan's stomach was covered with hundreds of holes, and he was bleeding!" Could I ever hope to find such a devoted research assistant.
Sandra and Stan were concerned about getting into Canada with the blowfish, thinking it might be an endangered species. But honesty is sometimes the most expedient policy. When they got to customs and the officer said, "What did you buy in Guadeloupe?" they answered “a lamp.” "A lamp?" he shrugged at the bulbous thing swathed in newspaper. “OK, a lamp." And he waved them through.
Smuggling a kitchen sink?
Another time Sandra and Stan came back from a shopping expedition in New York City with an enormous cast-iron kitchen sink. "At the border when they asked what we'd bought," Sandra said, "Stan said, `Everything, including the kitchen sink,' and they laughed and waved us on."
Good ol' Stan. Count on him to scout the Paris sex shops when Sandra was too embarrassed to venture inside. Sandra thought it would be cute to bring her teenage son some risque playing cards from Paris. Nothing hard-core, mind you. Just some naughty-girlie stuff.
The couple roamed from one arrondissement to another. Stan checked out the goods inside, while Sandra loitered nonchalantly outside. But they couldn't find aything that wasn't too kinky, steamy, gender-bending or raunchy. Stan finally rebelled. It was one thing to have a snapshot taken with your wife by the side of a road under a sign that said "Intercourse, Pa. 5 miles," but something else to be seen in all of Paris's sex shops in a single afternoon.
Born with price-tag ink in her blood
Sandra's marvelous souvenir collection is a product of genetics. Unlike me, she was born with price-tag ink in her blood, to a mother whose biggest fantasy was to be locked up inside Manhattan’s Macy's Department Store all alone for a weekend, and a father who worked as a freelance stagehand scavenging for props for early TV, movies and Broadway.
I did my own two-year stint contributing to a column called The Passionate Shopper for New York Magazine. I covered subjects like costumers— Go Ga-Ga in a Gorilla Suit— pet stores—Where to Buy Your Bird—and how to bid for 350 dozen yarmulkes at a U.S. customs auction. My shopping career ended abruptly, however. I just didn't have the stamina and patience to shop till I dropped. Whereas Sandra did.
I started penning this Innocents Abroad column, in fits and starts, while reading Mark Twain's A Tramp Abroad in the sleeper car of an Amtrak train headed for South Carolina. And the dadburned thing's still not finished. So now I'm wondering what to bring back in the way of quirky souvenirs from my sojourn in the Bible Belt. Some contraband moonshine from a local whiskey still, disguised as a lava lamp? Or some filched tobaccy leaves? (They're still hanging in every old crumbling barn in East Tennessee.)
Snakes in the pulpit
Or better yet, one of those diamondback rattlers (dead and skinned, of course) used in a faith-testing ceremony in a local Pentecostal Holiness restorationist church in Greene County, Tennessee? Mark Twain The Great Exaggerator would have gone to great lengths to describe how the serpent he was smuggling had been one that had been held up to his very own face, but because of the greatness of his faith and devotion, did not even bare its fangs. (Because, you see, if you are bitten, it is your own fault, because the snake knows you are a disbeliever.)
I won't go that far. All I have in the way of first-hand experience with this bizarre religious sect is hearing the president of the local Tusculum College talking about his experience in one of these churches where they dump a box of mountain rattlers and let them slither all over and under the pews.
Upon entering the church, the college president took refuge from the serpents by standing on a pew, and watched, open-mouthed, as people put the snakes around their necks and up to their faces. That night anyway, no one was fatally bitten.
No, I won't go that far. I have no farther to go than the local Tusculum Wal-Mart to find an exotic "regional" souvenir. Baby Bala sharks and red-tail black sharks are only $9.97 U.S. each, which seems cheap for a shark. But if you price the baby catfish, $5.97 for a quarter-ouncer, that works out to $384 per pound! Rather pricey for a slimy-skinned fish that scums along mucky river bottoms. But dried, stuffed and hung, he might make a cute key chain.
