Spices and silks.
Back in Brooklyn, and I’d hoped to return from Orlando with a special gift for my sweet landlords, who live across the street and are unflaggingly helpful. Something beyond a standard tacky souvenir — citrus fruit, maybe? And then it occurred to me that I could simply order that online and have it shipped, sparing me from lugging it on the plane.
Which inspired another thought: In the age of the internets, can traveling still provide a special shopping opportunity?
Oh sure, not everything is available online — but a lot is, to a degree I never would’ve imagined growing up in the Old Country. As a little girl, I used to read books with characters who ordered clothing and rare luxuries from the Sears Roebuck catalog; I wasn’t doing anything far removed when I admired the copy in a J. Peterman catalog (I mentioned I was young, right?) or breathlessly awaited the arrival of Scholastic books ordered from those onion-skin-thin paper flyers or imagined a shopping trip to New York or Los Angeles to buy the cool products I saw in Sassy. When I was old enough to venture forth alone, I looked forward to buying John Fleuvog shoes in New York, Muji notebooks in Covent Garden, Nuxe dry oil in a Parisian pharmacy; the men in my life might gift me with carved turtles from Mexico or flower tea from Shanghai. Now there isn’t a single one of those things that you can’t purchase online; there’s even a great shop in SoHo devoted to the idea.
I know people still take shopping trips to major cities; where would Suzy Gershman be if they didn’t? And when I think about it, the thrill isn’t gone for me — it has simply changed. It remains my custom to buy a book in every place I visit, some famous (Shakespeare & Co. in Paris, where I purchased Edmund White’s The Flaneur; City Lights Books in San Francisco, where I purchased a copy of Allen Ginsburg’s Howl), some not (such as a nameless shop in Norfolk where I scored some vintage Françoise Sagan novels for 50p a piece). When I last returned from Paris, it was with a stem of a gorgeously scented (but totally poisonous) flowering plant from the balcony of my hotel room; from Rhode Island, a passel of freshly picked sweet corn. An acquaintance comes bearing mint leaves plucked from an Armenian field for tea; an old friend presents me with a particular type of English dime-store fountain pen that I like.
The best souvenirs are always the most personal, anyway; that’s a piece of the travel experience that the Internet will never deliver, wherever else it may transport you.