Illustration by Igor Bastidas

We have ideas on what to take away if you are visiting Costa Rica. Yesterday, Joshua Hunt made this unexpected recommendation on travel takeaways:

Want a Vacation Souvenir? Buy Toothpaste.

The quotidian joys of this pocket-size keepsake.

Six weeks after my first trip to Italy, the fresh mozzarella I brought home is long gone, and so is the hard salami and pistachio-flavored chocolate. To squeeze a bit more from my Mediterranean experience, I can rely a little while longer on the tube of Elmex-brand toothpaste I used to brush away all that food. For as long as it lasts, each day starts and ends with an ingredient called “Fluoruro Amminico,” which I assume has to do with fluoride but haven’t bothered to translate. The lingering sense of wonder it evokes is something I would rather not name.

Elmex is, strictly speaking, a Swiss brand, but its flavor, color and packaging will always for me be tied to the week I spent in Naples: the smell of the dewy summer air, the taste of plump local anchovies, the sight of Mount Vesuvius from the Riviera di Chiaia. I bought the toothpaste on the morning of my arrival, and spent scarcely a minute choosing Elmex over another brand. My habit of treating toothpaste as a souvenir is about celebrating rather than elevating the trivial — I’m not chasing quality, authenticity or meaning, those most overrepresented pursuits among world travelers. So I pick whatever seems fun, interesting or tame, depending on my mood. It’s a low-stakes exercise with just one rule: My selection must comply with the 100-milliliter limit for packing in my carry-on.

The effect of this habit is Proustian but its origin is not. About a decade ago, I chose to ignore some advice I was given before moving to Japan for a study-abroad program. Japanese toothpaste, I was told, might not be to my liking, so I should pack a few tubes of my favorite brand to take with me to Tokyo. Shunning even the most inconsequential new experience seemed to me a bad way of approaching a new life in a new country. I was 32 and had learned to wring all that I could from my days as a working stiff. Why shouldn’t I do the same as a slightly-too-old university student in Japan? I stretched my student loans and scholarship money so I could quench my thirst for novelty by drinking from the well of everyday experience — which, in Tokyo, runs deep with small consumer delights.

Among these delights, buying toothpaste I would never find in an American drugstore proved to be a reliable way of enlivening an otherwise unremarkable daily activity — one that we often treat as routine but that I try to embrace as a ritual for chasing the fog of sleep from my waking hours. Each new and unfamiliar flavor recalls a time and a place, but also serves as a gentle tap on the shoulder — a reminder to look at myself, not through myself, in the bathroom mirror and to appreciate even those moments spent brushing away the seeds of inevitable decay.

Read the whole recommendation here.