February 18, 2005 - Santa Fe, New Mexico.

We spent a bit of time working on the computers after breakfast and then drove over to spend another day with Terry, Phyllis, Nathan, and Joel. Nathan had taken a day off from his freelance computer programming job and Joel had Friday free of classes, so they could come with us on a day trip to Santa Fe. Now we had seen Santa Fe on our previous visit in 2003 (see Wanderung 3) where we had walked the Volksmarch there, but we had not had time to visit any museums or see any art galleries. We weren't sure about the art galleries, but the International Folk Art Museum that Terry suggested sounded interesting and that was our first goal of the day.

It was only about 60 miles between Albuquerque and Santa Fe, so we arrived shortly after 11 and started our tour of the museum. One of the permanent exhibition galleries in the museum focused on toys and miniatures from around the world, and another focused on Hispanic history and culture in the New Mexico area. We were delighted by all the toys and miniature things like doll houses on display. A model of a "speicherhaus" or German warehouse from the 1600s reminded me of the real (old) buildings we had toured during Wanderung 2 and 5 in Hamburg. I seriously considered trying to build one for Peanut because using the block and tackle hung at the roof peak to hoist up stuff to store in the warehouse just seemed like it would be a lot of fun.

More generally, it was interesting to see how toys from different cultures were in some cases quite similar and in other cases quite different. Carved wooden animals and figures for people occurred in a broad variety of cultures. One thing I had never seen before was a collection of paper theaters complete with paper actors and actresses for children to act out plays, operas, and so forth. Those paper theaters seemed, however, to have only happened in German, France, and England in the late 19th century. I was puzzled by that because once I had seen them it looked like such a good idea that I wondered why they weren't still being sold. It made me wonder what makes some toys become popular and then fade away into obscurity over the generations. In my own lifetime, for example, I've seen the hula-hoop craze come in the 1950s, go away, and then have a brief renaissance in the late 1980s, as I recall.

In two special exhibit halls the museum displayed Mardis Gras costumes and practices from all over the world. The costumes were wildly different from the extreme showpieces used in places like Brazil to the authentic folk costumes used in places like Switzerland. The practices associated with the use of those costumes during Mardis Gras varied even more than the costumes themselves. I recall people throwing dirt on spectators and whipping them in one culture compared to New Orleans in the U.S. where worthless beads were being thrown out to the crowd.

We spent several hours in that museum and then took a break for lunch while we discussed what to do next. Terry noted that Santa Fe had the highest concentration of art galleries outside of New York City, and he maintained that to really understand the soul of Santa Fe we would have to visit at least a representative sample of those galleries. We couldn't pass up "the Soul of Santa Fe", as my brother described it, so we spent the next hour or so wandering around the galleries clustered on Canyon Road.

The contents of those galleries were extremely diverse, ranging from bronze sculptures to artistic glass pieces to paintings. Along the way we even saw a few mobiles, a collection of Buddha statues in a garden (most with spare change lying in their laps), and a huge statue of a man asleep while lying in the earth. Some of the pieces of art were exquisitely beautiful while others were a bit strange, but I'm sure that judgment depends on the eye of the observer. Even in our little group we found a disparity in the assessment of the merits of different objects d' art. The one thing all the pieces had in common was that they carried hefty price tags, so the Soul of Santa Fe turned out to essentially be high-priced art.

We broke off the tour del art when the galleries closed at 5:30 and zipped back to Albuquerque for a final couple of hours of chatting with the family. That was fun, but we finally had to return to the trailer to get a good night's sleep, so we bid them all adieu and drove home for the night. I still had to bring the journal up to date, of course, so Monika worked with Daddy while I did that for a bit and then we both turned in for the night.