"The body is the primary mode of perceiving scale."
I think this one is self explanatory, but then again I have extensive travel experience so I know how much better it is to experience something in real time versus looking at a picture. Comments of people seeing the Hope Diamond or the Mona Lisa for the first time also fit alongside the above quote: "It's so small!...Was it always this small? It looked bigger in pictures." You haven't really experienced something unless you have shared physical space with it.
"The capacity of object to serve as traces of authentic experience."
When I went to Ireland, I had one thing I wanted: an authentic claddagh ring, but not the basic two hands holding the crowned heart that most people returned with. I was delighted to find a claddagh ring with a bit more personality which I have worn everyday since I bought it.
"The souvenir reduces the public, the monumental, and the three-dimensional into the miniature, that which can be enveloped by the body."
My dad likes to joke that I should send this photo to SuperDry for them to use as an advertisement but similar to my time in Ireland, I had one thing I wanted to buy while I was in England, and it was a SuperDry jacket. They are essentially England's equivalent of NorthFace, only more superior. I wanted this jacket for functionality as well as souvenir purposes since this coat saved me against Britain and Ireland's grey weather and every time I would wear it, I would be slipping into my memories of the best travel-filled year of my life.
"Nostalgia cannot be sustained without loss."
It is a regular occurrence for my friends and I to exchange memories across Facebook since we were united in England and our adventures throughout Europe but in America we live in different corners of the continent. It has been two years since we were together, so no one understands the connection between loss and nostalgia better than us.
"To have a souvenir of the exotic is to possess both a specimen and a trophy."
England is often praised for it's museums and the collections within, but a sense of dark humor hangs over it all with the simple fact that the museums - the British Museum to be particular - is a hoarding house of stolen treasures. This is just one photo from my gallivants through the museums but it gets the point across from the quote above: how the objects we collect as mementos are specimens from a land unknown to us and a trophy of our success in getting there.
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