Santa Fe | Taos |
Tries to be terminally cute. | Cute. |
Hills (bits sticking up). | Canyon (bits sticking down). |
Very English in a Spanish sort of way. | Quite Spanish in an English sort of way. |
Full of little museums. | Appears to be a museum. |
Tooled leather, sand paintings, silver and turquoise jewelry, and bloody big black hats. Hats too big to contemplate buying. | Tooled leather, sand paintings, silver and turquoise jewelry, and moderately big black hats. No hats big enough to fit me. (Yes, yes, you needn't think I haven't heard it before.) |
Shiny new out-of town mall, humungous masonic temple, memorials to the assorted to-ing and fro-ing with Mexico in the last century. | Ramshackle wooden shop selling the most amazing collection of children's books and toys, including great lip-reading stuff for blind godson (he being of an age where he reads everything with his lips). Still thinks it is in Mexico. |
Fake adobe Hilton (or similar) Hotel with electric fake candles in plastic fake brown-paper bags for months before and after Christmas. (Stayed at the fake adobe motel instead: log fires and beehive fire-places. Great fun lighting everyone else's fires when they couldn't.) | Stinking great bonfire in the middle of the road. (This transpired to have been a petrol tanker and another truck in an earlier incarnation.) Decided not to stay overnight. Life too exciting for a mere European. |
Fake adobe multi-storey car park. | Deceptively familiar parking meters. |
Plastic fake dried chillis hanging outside everywhere, including all four million art galleries. | Lots more fake plastic chillis, but real chillis drying in the lobby of the bank. |
Two foot of melting slush on the sidewalks, but people walking in the streets. Roads awash with salty water and grit. | Swept sidewalks, windswept roads, no snow in sight, and not a soul using legs apart from the two of us (and I'm not admitting to what we were using them for). |
Yuppie tapas bar with tolerable coffee masquerading as espresso. The only good coffee for a week. | Moderately convincing English tea shop, but with chillis. No, really. The only drinkable tea on the whole trip apart from Los Alamos. (Oops.) |
Red-hot chilli at the biker-ridden eatery where the railway station ought by rights to be. | No sign of the railway. Chizz. Red-hot chilli somewhere else, though, so that's not so bad. |
Of course I may be under-sampling: we need another grant for further research. | |