Things I Would Have Bought If I Had a Home, Not a Pack

It broke my heart to leave these items behind, and not bring them home as keepsakes of our adventures. But alas, like a turtle, I travel with my home on my back (and a 20kg limit on every flight), so I will have to be satisfied simply bringing home memories.

What I Would Have Bought…

• Bottles of home-brewed rakia from Bulgaria
• A glass for Turkish tea with gold leaf at the edge
• A Turkish coffee service set
• A Turkish rug
• Multicolor Turkish stained glass lamps
• Big Turkish towels for my imaginary pool
• Indoor slippers and plastic bathroom slippers from Japan
• Window chimes
• Chopstick stands
• Sake cups
• Bottles of sake and shochu you can’t get in the States
• Paper lanterns from Hoi An, Vietnam
• An incredibly cheap, but high-quality custom-tailored dress from Vietnam
• Big ceramic blue and white bowls for noodle soup
• An enormous wall painting of a Buddhist tree from Laos
• A wrought-iron statue of a Vietnamese rice-farming stick figure holding baskets that form a scale

Despite our circumspection and self-restraint in all the markets we’ve visited, we have picked up a few small trinkets, which were picked with careful consideration to commemorate our travels.

What (Lightweight and Tiny) Things I Did Buy…

• Earrings from a South African shop in Bristol, England–I got these when shopping with a half-South African friend who visited me 6 years ago when I was living near Joburg.
• A Turkish shawl
• A bumper sticker from a brewery we visited multiple times in our favorite Japanese mountain town (Matsumoto Brewery)–I put it on my Nalgene, and often look at it as our adventures continue in other countries!
• A bandana depicting a map of our trekking route through the Japanese Alps
• A woven Laotian table runner
• A scarf from a village along the Mekong in Laos
• An aluminum cup used to make Vietnamese drip coffee
• Cooking chopsticks
• A softball-style sleep shirt with an orangutan (and a random NFL logo!) from Sumatra, Indonesia
• Blue and gold earrings covered in batik cloth from Yogyakarta, Indonesia