Santa Fe, NM reacted to the challenge of outlying malls by turning its downtown into a tourist mecca.
This works in a basically honest kind of way here–Santa Fe has been a marketplace/meetingplace almost since its founding in 1610. Spanish and Moorish and Mexican and Native American and Anglo architectural history get all mixed together here under dramatic sky-fuls of hot sunshine, huge white clouds, enormous black thunderstorms.
The downside, for an incidental visitor like me (I’m here because Frank is here giving some physics lectures) is that walking downtown requires huge self-control. So I invented and now keep repeating a Santa Fe mantra:
- I don’t need any silver-and-turquoise jewelry.
- I don’t have a museum in my house for Indian pottery.
- I don’t wear broomstick skirts or cowboy boots.
- My religious beliefs do not require Mexican holy wood carvings.
This mantra is working quite well, although I did give in to buying a red straw hat. Wow, sunrises and sunsets are gorgeous here, and the wide desert sky has room for so much of them. So maybe I should add one more line to my mantra:
- I do not plan to become an oil painter dedicating a lifetime to magnificent sky scapes.
Whew! Wish me luck, I’m off to climb a mountain.