Fanta Se

We spent the afternoon in Santa Fe.

Our first stop was the new Daiso. In Japan, Daiso is a 100 yen shop (basically a dollar store), filled with cheap and cheerful things made in China for the Japanese market. In Santa Fe for the same cheap and cheerful things made in China for the Japanese market, the prices start around $1.75 and go up from there. We spent around $98 and came home with a big bag full of things we don't really need (but which were too cheap to pass up). Dave got a set of three cooking chopsticks and a small metal colander and some red bean yokan among other things. I got a lot of stationery and some salted kelp and some crafty, sewing things. Sadly, they were sold out of many snacks (they just opened mid-January and there was a run on things like snacks which they have not yet restocked), so we didn't get much more than the yokan and some non-wasabi peas.  How did we manage to spend $98? We just kept tossing items into our basket with abandon, as though we were actually shopping at a store where things only cost a dollar.

When we finally made our way to the register, we found a self-checkout with no bags. They had run completely out of bags. The person who informed us of this was, like, oh, yeah, sorry. But didn't offer any alternative, like, "But we do sell totes" or "Here's a cardboard box if you want to use that." She just kind of stood there and stared at us. This is a very Santa Fe vibe. So Dave went out to the car to get a bag while I scanned (mostly scanned) our basket of things. 

After Daiso, we went to Kakawa, our favorite chocolate shop and came away with way too many chocolate things. Dave got a shake (which I helped him drink) and I got a rose caramel brownie (very, very good). We also got a box of chocolate truffles, everything from goat cheese and sage to mescal to biscochito. Again, we dealt with the Santa Fe vibe from the woman who took our order. She was very slow but pleasant, and had a blank kind of expression on her face. I felt like maybe she had taken an edible and then just wandered into the place and forgotten why she came in so they put her to work and she just kind of played along.

It reminded me of this one time I was in Santa Fe and I went to buy a cactus from this guy at a farmers market. All his plants were labeled except the one I wanted and when I asked him if I could take a label from one of the other plants of the same kind, he was, like, "oh no!" aghast. He very carefully wrote out a label on a popsicle stick and then before he would hand it over to me, he said, "This plant likes to be in some shade, perhaps the dappled light from a cottonwood." And I was, like, yeah, I'll get right on that.

That is a Santa Fe vibe.

We came home just as the sun was setting.