Souvenir Stash: my souvenir collages

When reflecting on my favourite souvenirs, I initially thought to share my collection of shot glasses, clad in a flag print bikini of whichever country they were bought in. They’re sometimes tough to find in small local stores and collect dust amidst their home on the top of my wardrobe. They’re a thrill to look at, mesmerised by the rainbow of revealing swimsuit designs and whilst they're still amongst my most precious belongings, I will admit that they are more of a novelty than a token of sentimentality. 

 I decided, that my most beloved pieces of memorabilia were less about what I could buy, but more about what I could scrounge, find or collect. 

My favourite souvenirs are handmade: collages of pointless junk which hold practical memories of seafood brunches with friends, and cocktail umbrellas from solitary nights reading on hotel balconies with a fruity refreshment and cheap, trashy paperback novel.  

My best souvenir collage is one made of scraps from a girl's holiday in Tenerife, a mosaic of trash and treasure. This scrapbook method of documenting my travels is preferable for two main reasons. Firstly, it united all of my dearest friends during our summertime trip. Each night in our rented apartment, the girls would tip out their purses in pursuit of discarded receipts and bills that they picked up throughout the day and thought I might like to keep. Secondly, once back home on familiar turf and armed with a glue stick and artistic vision, it gave me the chance to relive the holiday as I sifted through my smuggled keepsakes.  

Now, months on from our holiday, I can hunt my collage out from my cluttered desk drawer and reminisce on the memories past (such a ritual usually ends with me begging my girls to book another trip post haste!). There are receipts of fancy evening meals, like the one hosting the ribeye steak that I pined over for days after. Next to these are maps of the waterpark where we all left either severely burned or bruised, with sore tummies from laughing. There’s the sleeve for our room key which we misplaced too many times to count, paper straws from a lunch on our final afternoon, and pool tiles from the hotel where we ogled at the water aerobics each morning.  

So, as soppy as it sounds, I suppose my favourite travel souvenir isn’t anything fancy or material but instead, simply the evidence that it happened at all.