Description: Visiting historical sites in Old Town San Diego is as good a pretext as any for doing what most people who come to Old Town do: shop and eat. Interlarded among the city’s oldest houses (most now housing museums) are delightful shops, bazaars, and restaurants, most with a Mexican theme.
The nine square blocks of the State Historic Park do a good job of recreating the Mexican and early American periods circa 1821-1872. Included are such historic structures as California’s first schoolhouse, San Diego’s first Courthouse, the state’s first newspaper office, and five original adobe buildings.
If the truth be known, we gave short shrift to the museums and historical displays, drawn like moths to the flame of the mercantile aspects of the area, but we did enjoy visiting the largest and most famous of the Old Town adobes, Casa de Estudillo, which was the residence of the commander of the San Diego presidio. Arranged around a courtyard, the rambling building houses furniture and other artifacts from the appropriate period. It’s a pleasant place to enjoy the garden (perfumed by scented geraniums) while sitting by the fountain in the peaceful courtyard.
At El Centro Artesano, we hit our stride, entering a wonderland of kitsch: Mexican kitsch, NewAge kitsch, Far Eastern kitsch – our cup runneth over with kitsch. Specifically, this emporium specializes in garden statues, kinetic lawn sculptures, and wind chimes. This, we unanimously decide, will be the place we will each buy Something Completely Useless.
We spend a good half hour trying to outdo each other in buying something that we genuinely like but have no earthly use for. Jack is torn between a gaudily painted
Dia de los Muertos skeleton and a large metal lizard with wonderfully nubby spines (the lizard wins; he already has a fairly large
Dia de los Muertos collection). I contemplate wind chimes, spending entirely too long to find the ones with just the right timbre. Greg, after being dissuaded from buying a cactus (impractical to transport) or a kinetic sculpture of Uncle Sam milking a cow labeled "Taxpayer" (too Republican) inexplicably gloms on to a second set of wind chimes of inferior chimage to mine.
(Yes, I realize "chimage" is not a word. But you know what I mean.)At this point, although I personally felt we’d done our bit for the local tourist-based economy, Jack spotted a gem and fossil shop across the street. As he oogled trilobites, Greg, no doubt acutely aware of the inferiority of his wind chimes, successfully badgered us into buying him a polished stone ball made of tiger eye. Jack upped the ante at the next shop, "Shump Ko Hup," which means "Dream Come True" in the Yaqui Indian language of Southern California, by shopping for a woven horsehair hat band. (Frankly, I was relieved he wasn’t buying another bolo tie.) Our money. Their dream.
Laden with our possessions, we left historic Old Town, a lovely place if you have plenty of stamina and a charge card.
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