May 21, 2021 Day 34， Santa Fe, New Mexico

We stumbled on a shop in Santa Fe with wooden doors lined in rows. After entering through the shop part, we walked through a backdoor and discovered a warehouse filled with delicately carved wooden arches, doors, and mirrors, and giant mosaic tables in swirling sunflower patterns. These were stapled with paper numbers and leaning on each other in rows with no presentation whatsoever. When we kept walking, we wound up in the sunlight with a giant marble elephant flanking the entrance to more doors in a maze-like structure in the sunlight.

The big event of the day was MeowWolf - from their website, it doesn’t make any sense. After walking around the exhibit for over an hour, I can now confidently say that this exhibit makes no sense. Their color scheme seemed to be black walls, black ceiling, black floor, and neon purple, green, and orange with strobe lights. There was a house with secret tunnels in the refrigerator, closets, and the fireplace. They led to an ice cave where we could play music on a lit-up fish skeleton stretching across the ceiling, a two-story treehouse, and portal to dimensions. One room was entirely covered with frames of ordinary items - used toothpaste, handheld recorders, stuffed elmos - and the floor lined with bottle caps. The clues across the house pointed towards a time travel machine, an outer dimension force called the Anomaly which sent creatures to earth, and children who saw into multiverses.

We went to a pottery shop. The lady enthusiastically told us about which pots were fired by which people from separate pueblos. They used the same firing techniques as years ago, using clay from their pueblos. In a certain firing technique, if they covered the clay with cow or horse poop, the clay would turn out black. One very large pot priced at $80,000 was by a small lady less than five feet tall, and her grandchildren would help her collect the clay and turn the pots while in the kiln.