Lessons learned

Among other things, I learned, today, Monday, that all the shops in Old Town Spring are, on Monday, closed.

Bummer.

A friend and I took the day to go check out one of the few areas around here that has actual charm. "Charm" is, naturally, an elusive quality - difficult to define, even more difficult to achieve in such a way that we, the public, are all sufficiently "charmed."

However, I doubt many people would disagree that a strip mall - even a lovely strip mall (and there are some) - encompasses "charm" to any degree. Nor a mall. We have shopping malls here in Houston that are elegant, glamorous. Very high-end. But shopping malls they are; they all retain that rather sterile quality that comes from housing chain stores. Whether they are very ordinary mall stores, or very high-end stores, they all possess a ubiquitous property, one of sameness: they have no desire for variety.

Old Town Spring is a hodgepodge of antique stores, of trinkety shops. Not somewhere I'd recommend if you need a pair of socks or some jeans. But it's a fun place to browse, to look for gifts or kitsch. And the shops are outdoors, under the tress. On a perfect March spring day, it was just the place to be. We were all set to spend our day browsing, looking for artwork, for decorative accessories.

Alas - there were none to be had. Nor lunch. So, in an ironic turn, we ended up at the Woodlands Mall. It is one of the nicer malls in Houston - full of the afore-mentioned medium-end mall stores - and we enjoyed our time in Pottery Barn and Williams Sonoma. Didn't even make it to the Apple store or any clothing stores, we spent so much time in the kitchen wares.

All in all, the day wasn't really about shopping, anyway. It was about spending the day with a friend, visiting, browsing, catching up. And now we've had to keep the trip to Spring on the agenda.

Not a bad day after all.