Why We Buy Dumb Souvenirs

Yahoo!Travel is featuring a great essay by Rolf Potts discussing why we buy dumb souvenirs.  Potts claims that people lose all dignity buying souvenirs (his example:  a t-shirt from Key West, proclaiming, “I’m not a bitch, I’m ‘Miss Bitch’ to you”), because it’s not so much that the souvenirs are intended to indicate taste, so much as the experience of souvenir-buying is part of the entire holiday experience.

It was definitely a great read.  As for my husband and me, we’ve recently taken up buying art from the places we visit — we’re both artoholics, and now the walls of our house provide us memories of our favourite holidays.

Well, the art, but also the refrigerator magnets.  You can’t really have too may of them, can you?

What about you — what souvenirs do you tend to buy on your trips?