At the time it seems like a good idea, but it IS NOT.
Useful and useless souvenirs. The useless ones are going to be useless in the Amazon town where you bought them and also (or more) at home. You have the supplies in the English Court at half price and they take them home.
Biography of a souvenir. The vital journey of these pieces of junk has been: twenty years in the shopkeeper's window, a week in your suitcase, five minutes in the hand of the gift recipient and a lifetime in the back of the closet.
Custom souvenirs. There are mandatory souvenirs, the ones that are bought because someone (your girlfriend or your sister basically) has insisted that you have to drag some ugly junk around buses, roads, trails, boarding lines, Mc Donalds and crowded squares of suspicious people. Meanwhile, they will be on the sofa at home eating cupcakes. I once heard Manu Leguineche say that if there is something certain about a trip, it is that no matter how much you pay and how well organized it is, at some point you will have to drag your suitcase yourself. And it turns out that there is one of those crazy rules of quantum physics that says that a suitcase full of souvenirs weighs twice as much as a suitcase without souvenirs that weighs the same. It is an extra psychosomatic load. A souvenir should be a memory of the place you visited , but, paradoxically, you will remember the person who commissioned it throughout the trip.
Souvenirs of own tontuna. Even if you don't understand it later, there are memories that you take care of yourself and put them on your back, like a volunteer sisyphus . You have spent the morning sweating profusely on the coffee plantation (like day laborers, but without the first-hour pomace), you have felt like Indiana Jones walking around the town surrounded by children; you've navigated the lake where the Lacandon Indians dodge pumas and fish for mullet, even though the only critters you've been able to see (all the time) are culeiro mosquitoes. And there you have your beautiful Stockholm syndrome. You get the complete pack: five kilos of coffee in a solid wooden box, family hammock (for five) braided by hand and bow, quiver and arrows . Except for the arrows, which will be taken from you at the airport, the rest will become your most memorable travel companion until you get home not knowing where to put it.
Storage. At the dawn of tourism, souvenirs were a serious thing. Those who did a European Grand Tour they brought home paintings, sculptures, desks, bronzes, Romanesque churches, pyramids … Upon returning home, they had no choice but to put all that junk on display and visitors were forced to hear the full story of the looting, a torture comparable to current photo shows. If things got out of hand, they founded the British Museum. In those cases the souvenir was bidirectional and you also left a memory to the friendly and hospitable natives of the country . For example, the hole in the frieze of the Parthenon is like a gigantic graffiti that says “the Count of Elgis was here”.
get vaccinated Before leaving on a trip, a walk through the Plaza Mayor of your own town and a detailed analysis of the tiles, refrigerator magnets and bull and flamenco figures that they sell to outsiders is recommended.