Many speak of this town with reverence..it appears to be a haven for art and artists and indeed, has generated some of the best art the US has ever produced.

Bullshit.

Santa Fe is a town of rigid conformity. Civic law demands that no building be over 4 storys tall, and they all must be ADOBE BROWN, even if the buildings are not actually made of ADOBE. The buildings are the same color as the earth around that part of New Mexico. You would think that this would be great..unintrusive human habitation..the result is somewhat different however..what you end up with is a monotonous, monochromatic urban scape.

Everywhere you turn, it's brown. Brown brown brown brown brown. I don't care if I never see that fucking color again, and I was only there 4 days. Growing up there must be a nightmare.

At this time of year it is rather bleak. It's winter, but Santa Fe only gets JUST cold ENOUGH to sustain a few inches of snow which quickly melts and turns everything into mud. BROWN mud. The trees are leafless and bare. You eventually get the feeling you are in one giant mud puddle.

The city boasts a huge number of galleries. For it's size this is true. There really is little else in the way of industry there. Canyon Road is considered the high culture area. The galleries are piled up next to one another, and you quickly learn that they are indistinguishable. Some are folk, some are contemporary, some show ancient artifacts, and some are SOUTHWESTERN. But once you have seen one Pueblo Blanket for 2500 dollars you have seen them all. The street is filled with looky-loos walking up and down..typically white folks in their late 50's.

You cannot swing your arms without hitting a dirty Subaru.

Driving around Santa Fe is an excersice in idiocy. Natrually, the roads are shit.

The people who live there fall into a few basic groups. You have the liberal aging hippie crowd who drone on about what a great city Santa Fe is. They like to wear broaches and native trinkets they pick up at the oh-so-quaint plaza where the indians are exploited for their Kitsch value. You have the cowboys...seriously. In 2004, the age of the industrial feed lot. These fuckers wear cowboy hats and jeans. Reminds you that you are close to Texas. Then there are the indians. Hopi, Adobe, Publo, Navajo, and Assante. They sell cheap trinkets in town or work in one of the BILLION casinos around New Mexico. They appear in post cards in the gift shops too. Lastly, you have the spanish..the last vestiges of european colonialism are evident in the mish mash of native and catholic religion that people practice in the state. They also do the working jobs like construction and garbage collection.

One cool thing though..the Hopi got into a fight with the missionaries a few hundred years ago, and managed to win a battle where they stuck the missionaries heads on stakes and left the church to decay as a monument to the victory. To this day, the Hope forbid anyone from going to this particular church and it decays still. Right on.