(This series is cross-posted on the Family Travel blog.)

Welcome back to this three-part video series about shopping for inexpensive travel souvenirs. I had no idea how much stuff I’d collected over the years until I pulled it all out to shoot a video.

Part One was a general overview of my souvenir philosophy (inexpensive, evocative of origin and hopefully useful in daily life) with some examples of fun items I’ve scored, like a rubber ear acupuncture training device from the medical supplies section of a Hong Kong department store. Gee, maybe that’s not very useful in daily life….:)

Part Two below talks about the items everyone seems to find: coffee mugs and T-shirts. Watch the video for my suggestions on how to find unique versions of them during your travels.

Part Three, the final video, will give you a quick tour of assorted doo-dads in my house, many picked up for a song, including a fun Harry Potter movie poster in Japanese.

For RSS/feed readers and anyone else who may not be able to see the box, click here for the YouTube URL for the video.

No matter how overrun the world becomes with tourists or drowned under the glossy pages of travel magazines, there are some places that are still worth approaching with an unjaded eye. Paris is one of them. From the hill of the Sacré-Coeur Basilica, the city presents itself with the pastel details and strange soft light that have drawn painters for centuries. When I first saw it, I wished I had a pastel stick in hand and knew how to use it. I was there over the weekend of my 30th birthday, and as little interest as Paris ever held for me (so much more to see in the world! so many places less tramped by busloads of my noisy countrymen!), spending three days walking through the drizzle felt like a coming of age. Maybe I’ve read too many Edith Wharton novels.

I didn’t fall in love with Paris, but I felt humbled. Coming from New York, where architects and politicians were bickering over what to put on the site of the World Trade Center and how quickly they could get it up (no pun intended), I leaned against the Notre-Dame Cathedral that took nearly 200 years and the commitment of more than one kind of faith to erect. Brushing its scrubbed stone, it’s hard to escape the thought that it’s a sad world that fails to build for the unseen future. Through the hordes of tour groups, the Gothic lines and gargoyles of the Cathedral are still something of beauty.

Paris was noisier than I imagined, especially around the sprawling Place de la Concorde, but many leafy streets were quieter than seemed possible coming off the Champs-Elysées overrun with traffic. The food … well, how can you go wrong? But call me frivolous, it was windows full of elegant, well-shaped shoes that made me yank my husband’s sleeve and delay lunch a while. What is it about shoes? I could take some of those French ones to bed with me.

I tried hard to walk around Paris with Proust not on my mind, because I’d just read Adam Gopnik’s unfortunate memoir Paris to the Moon, in which Proust very loudly and blatantly was. It’s hard, though, to spend three full days there and not find your sentences suddenly lengthening with columns of semi-colons that tell stories meandering across decades.

Can’t help it. Paris is lovely. Paris is romantic. Paris is an April city — fresh-faced but wise with the battering of a long, cold winter; introspective; thoughtful; a time and a place when it’s okay to walk the sidewalks for hours and be struck anew with the beauty of spring bulbs; or dash into a cafe with a book or notepad or a laughing friend and sip chocolat with a silly smile on your face.

I envy those folks who travel but don’t have a burning desire to bring back tokens of their visits. My own home bulges with tangible reminders of the places I’ve been lucky enough to see.

The ideal travel souvenir is relatively inexpensive, evocative of its origin and (hopefully) useful in one’s daily life. It’s easy to find costly items to bring back that serve no function other than as dust collectors or to impress others, but the true traveler’s challenge is to find unique, fun mementos that bring good memories without flattening the wallet.

In the video below (Part One of a three-part video series - here’s Part Two and Part Three) I discuss a variety of ideas for inexpensive travel souvenirs that can be found just about anywhere in the world. There’s no shopping snobbery here; ideas include plastic floatie pens and medical supplies. (!)

For RSS/feed/email readers and anyone who can’t see the video box, click here for the video’s URL on YouTube.

Corrections: the Hong Kong map I show is in Chinese, not Japanese (duh) and this is the first video in a three-part series, not two.

If you’re looking for something to give Istanbul back a sense of flair, a sense of mystery — a sense of Constantinople in fact — Jason Goodwin’s The Snake Stone is just what you need. With impeccable main character Yashim, a plot full of hints and insinuations, and Goodwin’s background as a Cambridge scholar of the Ottoman Empire, The Snake Stone is a delicious read for travelers, mystery lovers, and even armchair historians.

I read a lot of mysteries, but in Goodwin’s first novel The Janissary Tree I found the first new author in a very long time to impress me with storytelling, character building, and a sense of place. In his Edgar Award-winning debut novel, Goodwin introduced detective Yashim, a eunuch living in 1830s Istanbul, who has the ear of the sultan, access to the harem, friends across the social spectrum, and a passion for cooking. It was an excellently written novel in both plot and characters, but its real pull was the image of Istanbul under a sultan eager to reform the Ottoman Empire along European lines.

Goodwin continues this theme in The Snake Stone. Through his fictional accounts, Goodwin aims to give an accurate description of Constantinople on the cusp of turning into Istanbul. Men are abandoning the turban for the fez, and robes for trousers. The old ways are being phased out, and we get to watch the process.

The presence of Istanbul is palpable throughout Goodwin’s writing. And no wonder. Not only is he a scholar, he’s written a travel book based on his epic walk from Poland to Istanbul: On Foot to the Golden Horn, which won the John Llewellyn Rys Prize for travel writing. Goodwin brings his knowledge of and love for the Ottoman Empire to life in his mystery novels. In both books Yashim practically gives readers a walking tour of the Istanbul he knows as he follows hints and clues throughout the city. In The Snake Stone he focuses on the history and mysteries of the Aya Sofia, the beautiful cathedral-turned-mosque in the central city; and makes an unexpected but thrilling detour through Istanbul’s ancient waterworks.

I still think of Turkey as one of the most beautiful and fascinating places I’ve ever visited, but I’d like to go back, Goodwin’s books in hand, and walk the streets of Istanbul with new eyes.

This is normally an occasional Monday feature, but yesterday sort of blew up when my son had to stay home with an allergic reaction to his staph infection medication.  Isn’t parenting fun? :)

The Americas

**  In some circumstances, the Amish in the US use telephones.  Take a look at just how they do it….  And for you trailer/RV fans, how about these beautiful Amish-built teardrop trailers?  I want one!

**  Do you have time on your hands and want to drive from Florida to points north?  In the spring, Hertz starts the annual one-way rental car migration to get ready for summer travel.  The good deal is that they need bodies to drive those cars.  Is that you? If not, there’s always cycling in Florida.

**  Apparently, the latest hot foodie/dining city is….Cleveland, Ohio.  The US is full of surprises; Lonely Planet says that even the presidential campaigns are fun, and in the dead of winter, the place to be is yep, Chicago.

**  There’s still time for Valentine’s Day: try one of the 5 romantic destinations in the US South, or maybe you’ll get lucky with the Eagles….standing on the corner in Winslow, Arizona.

**  Visiting California?  Tech video pioneer Robert Scoble blogs about the interesting things you’ll find in the entrepreneurial neighborhood of Palo Alto, and the Traveling Mamas have tips for a budget vacation in high-end Santa Barbara.

Europe

**  Writer, researcher and PhD candidate danah boyd is an expert in how preteens/teens use social media, so she got an invite to the prestigious Davos (Switzerland) World Economic Forum and an introduction to some of the strange-but-true absurdities of Davos. From her lodging description, it sounds like a Swiss igloo would be a better hotel.

**  I’ve written before on PT about the hazards of driving on the “wrong” side of the road, for those who are used to the other side.  An enterprising hotel near Galway, Ireland is offering a bit of driver training for the orientation-impaired.

Middle East & Africa

**  Thomas Swick nails it with his impressions of Mumbai: the gateway to India.

**  I was struck by the honesty of a post on the US State Dept blog Dipnotes, written by a Foreign Service Officer who lost everything in the chaos of an embassy evacuation in Chad.  Embassy evacuations of staff and citizens was a mission that I trained for while in the Navy.

**  A look at how current problems in country are affecting people in the beach tourism industry in Kenya.

Asia & Australia/New Zealand

**  The UK’s Guardian offers 10 of the best ways to see China in 2008.  You may even be able to still get tickets for some Olympic events, and while visiting you can get an up-close look at how millions of Chinese use the Internet and greet the World Wide Web.

**  You get what you pay for with tailors in Vietnam,  there’s a great lesser-known ski spot in Japan and even the experienced traveler wrestles with discombobulation in Tokyo.  New Zealand-based blogger Liz Lewis highlights the beautifully-photographed Eating Asia blog. 

**  Once you pay for the flight to get there, I found top 10 affordable pads in New Zealand.

Antarctica

**  Follow my Twitter friend Colin Browning and his Mom on their adventures way down under, in the Antarctic Blog. 

Worldwide/General 

**  You want real, you want authentic, but just HOW real and authentic?  A discussion on Budget Travel about “poverty tourism.”

**  No kidding — savvy business travelers are learning that there’s a lot of good travel information in blogs, so they’re reading them.  Hotels and airlines are figuring it out as well, so they’re jumping on the blog bandwagon.  Do their blogs have a genuine, human voice, or are they seen as just a marketing tool?

**  There’s hope for the rest of us:  a budget hotel building boom is afoot and youth hostels are getting a makeover (hint, they aren’t just for “youth” anymore.)

**  Blog carnival goodies:  our post about the Alfa Brewery in Limburg, the Netherlands was featured in the Life Lessons of a Military Wife carnival. Thank you!

**  Finally, the David Armano from the Logic+Emotion blog has HAD it with stupid hotel room sinks.