Santa Fe

A few weeks ago, my friend Rivkela and I took a jaunt up to Santa Fe. I know, all you outsiders think Santa Fe is a hip, cool place to go. Having spent most of my life a mere hour away from it, I've never had a very high opinion of the place. I guess the people seem all artsy-fartsy and hoity-toity. Everything is old, but on purpose. Some of it looks neat and historical, some of it is just falling apart crummy. Santa Fe is the kind of place where you can be in Joann Fabrics and a lady wearing a glittery masquerade mask is just walking around like it's not weird, just part of her outfit. And yes, that happened to me once.

So why did I want to go there? Two words: Rail Runner. That's a fairly new commuter train set up between Belen and Santa Fe, hitting Los Lunas, Albuquerque, Bernalillo and the rez in between. I was dying to ride the train.



Guess how much it cost, round-trip? Five bucks. That's right, $5. So we ride the train up and went on a museum adventure. Because if there's one thing Santa Fe has going for it, it's art and history. We started at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Georgia being my newest obsession. I don't even care about her art; I just am interested in her. This museum was small. And if I didn't get the half price N.M. discount, I might have been a bit miffed. But I got the chance to see some of her work in person, and watch two films about her. Georgia O'Keeffe spent many years living at Ghost Ranch, N.M. Incidentally, there is a new installment of Ghost Ranch photography by Craig Varjabedian currently showing at the Albuquerque Museum, and I checked that out recently with my friends Ren and Ken.


Photo copyright Craig Varjabedian.

I don't have permission to post it, but I want to say that it's a wonderful collection of photography. Beautiful black and white, with amazing use of light.

OK, so back to Santa Fe, poor Rivkela had just had an allergic reaction to Penicillin and was absolutely covered in hives. She was miserable and trying to stay covered up despite the heat. The second place we visited was the New Mexico History Museum. We didn't spend a whole lot of time there, but there was a lot of really neat stuff. Too much to read and absorb if you're in a hurry, but there is a fashion through the ages exhibit that's really neato. Again, really glad to have the N.M. resident discount.

At this point, I was really hungry, so we went to Upper Crust Pizza, a little pizza joint where you can eat in Santa Fe and not go broke. It's delicious.

You can see that we forgot to take pictures for most of the day ...

After this, we went to a really interesting place called Kakawa Chocolate House. It serves chocolate elixirs made from really pure, high-quality chocolate from Europe. Some of the recipes date back to the Aztec era and are several thousand years old.

OK, well here is where things get fun. You see, we had planned to hoof it to the Indian Arts and Culture Museum, which was a few miles from downtown Santa Fe where everything else that we did was. Several people warned us not to attempt this, and one lady showed us a bus to take to Museum Hill, where this museum is located. Only, we missed the bus, and the last bus back was at 5:45 p.m., since it was a Saturday.

The chocolate guy urged us to walk. He said it's not that far at all and a really pleasant walk. I guess if you like walking windy streets with no sidewalks and many cars zooming by, maybe so. We walked and walked. And then I realized that I had read the map wrong and we had missed our turn what seemed like hours ago. So we walked and walked some more.

At this point, we're not even hoping to see the exhibit. We're just worried about getting there in time to catch the last bus back. We did make it, with about five minutes to see the Native Couture fashion exhibit (that museum was free that particular day, so we didn't have to pay admission).

We found the bus stop out front and could finally relax.



Poor Rivkela and her itchy hives! I swear we walked 10 miles to the museum, but I guess it's only a mile and a half or so. I think google maps lies.

And so we headed home on the train, but not before enjoying some frozen yogurt at Yoberry.