Nov 17 2008
in which souvenirs hate me, part deux
Well, after shopping along Edinburgh’s Royal Mile today, I’ve discovered that the same phenomenon extends to Scotland as well, except here it’s even more annoying. I stopped in a bunch of shops that sold souvenir t-shirts, and it was more or less the same situation in other areas as well—everyone and their mom and their mom’s dog sells the same tartan throws and lambswool scarves and cashmere and stuff, and they also sell all the same t-shirts. Found many tolerable-to-pretty-awesome designs for men, ones that were clearly Scottish but still nice as t-shirts and not just tacky souvenirs. For women I think I found, like, five different designs. One was halfway decent and it was £15. I refuse to pay $30 for a shirt I’m not completely in love with, thank you very much. The other designs ranged from “meh” to actively blah, and the cheapest looked like a sport shirt, basically. Which would be fine for maybe five bucks but not for twice that.
Seriously, who thinks that women don’t want nice, interesting souvenir t-shirts as well as men? What is so hard to understand about this? I want a reasonably cheap shirt that is clearly influenced by and bought in the place I’m visiting but that also fits my style, which truly is not that picky when it comes to t-shirts. Is that really so much to ask?
