I decided to spend the morning like a person who lives in Santa Fe, sitting in a coffee shop reading the paper. My other goal was to find a shop called Uli which is owned by a friend of Sue's and say hello to her. On my way looking for a coffee shop, I ran into a guy carrying a harp in a case. I asked him where he was going to play. He said to me, "Do you own a restaurant?" He opened the case up and started playing it on the street. We played a couple of things for each other and then parted ways.
So we stopped and chatted, then he got the harp out, which was some kind of a South American harp, and he played some stuff, and I tried to play some stuff. The string tension was really loose (because it's a harp you play with your fingernails), and he had also put the strings on kind of willy nilly, so he had one red C string, but the next red string was a G, and some of the dark (green) strings were G's but one was an F. And some of the colored strings weren't even there. It was fun. Several people passed us, but nobody stopped to listen or give him any money. I guess busking isn't expected much in Santa Fe. He had a great repertoire of various Mexican styles of music that were quite wonderful.
On my trip around town, I wandered into a shop called Passementrie because they had a plethora of colorful things in the entryway. Mostly quilts. When I got inside, everything was exciting to look at. A riot of color. I ended up buying an alpaca sweater from Peru. It's gorgeous. I'm wearing it in the picture. It's so colorful I get lost in this place.
I had worn my bracelet that's a necklace today, and one of the stores I went into was interested in perhaps selling it. It turned out that the owner wasn't interested, but they might be interested in some babes if I made them in a cowgirl style. When I get home, I'll email them and send a couple of samples.
On my continuing hunt for skulls I passed a place called Il Piatto. Now, I'd been planning on stopping for coffee sometime this morning, but by now it's 1 p.m., so might as well have lunch. Well, this turned out to be really cool. They had a prix fixe menu (which was basically $15 to chose any three dishes on the menu. I had pumpkin truffle bisque to start, lemon rosemary chicken (which had too much lemon, and this is something I NEVER say) and tiramisu for dessert. I told the waiter I wanted to take the rest of the bread home and he brought me another three slices. DINNER!!
It's Lent so they have Jesus on the cross in front of the cathedral covered up with a purple cloth. I didn't know they did that on the outside of cathedrals.
I finally found Sue's friend Uli's place this afternoon. It's very close to the hotel, as it turns out, though I had a dozen people give me directions to it that I was incapable of following, including Sue. Right next door was an incredible bead shop where I found some really cool skulls -- literally the only ones in town. I've been on a skull hunt for months. Now I can make some killer muertos.
My last event of the day was a class in wirewrapping. Everybody who wants to do this has already been doing it for the last 20 years but I've never been that interested. Turned out it was a lot of fun and I was able to finish the project as fast as anybody in the class. I'm often the last person to finish a project, due to the fact that I don't follow directions all that well. I usually learn to do things by examining them and trying things out. This class was different in that the teacher was able to kind of explain things quite well without my having to make all the mistakes right away. So the project came out well.
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