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I just learned that they’re going to release “Firefly” on DVD. This makes me very happy. It was a really good show, and Fox was evil (and stupid) to cancel it. At least this way I’ll be able to see the episodes again.
Like I mentioned previously, there were a whole lot of art shop in Santa Fe. They specialized in Southwest Indian art. There were also some native artists that sold their stuff on the street in the plaza. (We bought a cool sand painting from one guy.) One of the main themes in this art (and also the cheesier souvenirs) is the bear fetish. There are pictures of bears, and little bear figurines. It’s a symbol that’s supposed to represent strengh. There was a tile with a bear like this on the outside of our hotel room. One of the most common motifs on the bear fetishes (and the one on the bears at our hotel) is this arrow across the bear’s side that points downward.
Because of this, we called it the Stock Market Bear.
Sorry I didn’t elaborate more about the trip yesterday, but I was very, very tired. As in basically no sleep tired. So I didn’t write very much, since I wasn’t sure how much sense it would make. However, now I am fully awake and ready to give you the full scoop on the trip and the wedding.
The trip out to New Mexico was rather uneventful. On the way to Denver (where we had a layover), the Michigan Men’s Lacrosse team was on the plane with us, which I found interesting. I guess they’re not a big enough and important enough team that they get to charter their own plane. Also, there were these people sitting behind us (this might have been on the flight to Albuquerque, I don’t remember) that apparently hadn’t been on a lot of plane flights. When we were landing they were completely freaking out and saying things like, “This is the bumpiest landing ever,” or something. I was just laughing, because it really wasn’t that bumpy at all. Believe me, if it’s bad, I know it because I get very, very miserable.
We landed in Albuquerque early afternoon, got our rental car (a convertible!) and drove straight to Santa Fe before getting lunch, so I didn’t really see any of Albuquerque. It seemed like any old city from what I saw, just with a lot of adobe and adobe-colored buildings. The convertible was fun. It was really windy when driving on the highway, but not as bad as I had expected. And the weather was beautiful, so it was nice to be sort of outdoors while we were driving. It was kind of weird driving through New Mexico. Apparently there’s nothing there. No farms, no cities along the highway like there would be in Michigan. It was just reddish mesas with these scraggly green bushes all over them. Kind of scenic, but not really all that pretty.
We didn’t do much of anything Thursday after getting to Santa Fe. We walked around a bit, but it seemed to be almost entirely art shops, and I didn’t really want/can’t afford expensive art. EVERYTHING in the city was adobe — or at least fake adobe. There was an adobe Gap, an adobe Banana Republic, and of course an adobe Starbucks. There was even this adobe ATM that we saw (picture will come later). There were a couple of cool churches that weren’t adobe — the cathedral and this little chapel that was apparently the first gothic structure west of the Mississippi. The little diag-like square was cool, and like the diag it had a lot of weird people there (usually smoking — ick!) So, after a little bit of looking around we went back to the hotel and watched the Michigan hockey game. (So unfair! We should have taken the lead late in the third, but the stupid ref blew the whistle too early! It was tragic and irritating.) We met up with Sara and had dinner with her, and then we got everyone (me, Dan, Sara, Meg, Jason, Greg, and Michelle) together afterwards in our hotel room and just hung out.
Friday was a little more interesting. After having lunch at the Haagen-Dazs store (which is also a cafe, not just ice cream), we all went out to Bandelier National Monument. On the way there we passed a couple LANL (Los Alamos National Laboratories) sites. Sara says that someplace in Los Alamos there’s a nerd crossing sign, but we didn’t have time to go looking for that. Bandelier was cool. It has these ancient Pueblo ruins. It’s nothing huge, like Mesa Verde, but it was neat anyway, and they had some ladders you could climb to go up into some of the cave rooms, and there was this one section where there were a bunch of petroglyphs carved in the rock. We also climbed up to this place called the Ceremonial Cave, which you have to climb 4 ladders (and 140 ft.) to get to. The ruins are in this place called Frijoles Canyon, and there’s this little stream running through it called El Rito de los Frijoles (the little river of the beans). I thought that was a really funny name, so I took a picture of it.
Finally, we come to Saturday and the wedding. (We did some souvenir shopping in the morning, but that’s not really important.) The wedding was very nice. Steph looked beautiful and very, very happy. The ceremony itself was strange because it had this weird mix of different traditions, and lots of symbols like dropping a circle of rose petals around the couple and ringing some sort of little bells. The minister had to give detailed explanations about all the symbols before each one, though, and that was a little annoying. The reception was pretty typical. They did that thing where you have to sing a song with “love” in it to make the bride and groom kiss, though, and I hate that, so I didn’t participate. But I did help think of inappropriate songs with “love” in them. “O, Canada” is still my personal favorite, although Greg did sing the really inappropriate Tom Lehrer song “I Hold Your Hand in Mine”, which was hilarious. Other than the love song thing, the reception was really nice and we had fun. The food was good too (it was Mexican), although I avoided eating a whole lot of it because I wasn’t supposed to eat spicy foods on account of being sick. And the wedding took place on the top floor of this hotel that was right near the plaza, and it had a really cool view of the cathedral. (I would have saved film and taken a picture, but I didn’t know about this ahead of time. However, Sara took a few pictures for me and said she’d send them to me.)
So that was the trip. To sum up, the wedding was very nice, New Mexico was interesting, even though it was way too full of fake adobe, and overall it was a good trip.