Tchoke Nation

Ask my parents. Whenever we went on a vacation, I had to get some sort of stupid trinket. Toy London cab, sure. Oversized penny and nickel commemorating the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials, oh yes. Piece of crap from Disney, of course. And so on...

This need to bring home something, this compulsive capitalism, was so overriding, so all-consuming, that my favorite part of any trip, anywhere, was inevitably the gift shop, I'd spy it on the way in and visualize it until we left, of course stopping on the way out to buy something, (anything!) before we moved on to arguing in the car. Almost any of those purchases are landfill, though the handsome cab is on a bookcase in my kitchen along with a replica of OJ's Bronco, I received for answering a trivia question in a bar.

I grew out of this, and my now my tourism is consumed by the adult pursuits of experience, food, and of course women. I have no interest in tchokes anymore, perhaps a little too little.

In Playa Del Carmen, the fast exploding tourist town I'm based in, the streets are lined with vendors selling all sorts of the usual shit; tacky tourist delight, Mexican style. It´s nothing you haven't seen before, the prices range from ok to exorbitant, and for the most part it's nothing you can't get at home, all too often nothing I can conceive of wanting, so why anyone would waste their vacation $$$ on most of it is beyond me. Yes, there are exceptions but a lot of it is completely disposable.

The best example of this is Senor Frogs, historically just a crappy Latin American destination tourist bar, but now, apparantly well branded enough to have a store the size of a large American Apparel or Gap. Inside you will find the Senor Frog logo plastered...everywhere.

The store is closed right now, but as near as I can tell, not a single item is Playa, or even Cancun specific, though surely some of them have to be, right? In fact, right now some imbecile is taking a picture of his girlfriend posing in front of the store. "Honey, remember the great times we had at the Senor Frogs in Playa, or was that the one in Coconut Grove? I think there´s one opening up in the mall soon, ooohhh." If Senor Frog has a real mascot, I´d like to eat the little bastard and then make disparaging remarks about how it tastes like chicken,

Now, I realize this all makes me sound like a bit of a spoilsport, but all of this made me think, apparantly really think, about what I might really want to bring home from Mexico, and I´ve been wandering into stores here and there with the notion that if I found something, anything that I truly wanted, I would buy it. So far, there has been nothing really. I´ll probably buy a piece of jewelry, but it´s nothing I can´t get at home. Last night, I would have bought a shirt from the place we went to see the turtles breed, but they were out of any size but small and extra small. No turtles either, though I´´m sure there are plenty of shells to buy in the stores of Playa.