Does the Karl Marx rubber duck that serves as my avatar count? I bought it at Karl Marx House in Trier during the bicentennial of Marx’s birth. Sadly, covid kept me from the Engels bicentennial two years later. I don’t think there were ducks.
Perhaps they had Muscovites?
I’d never looked at it closely, but by golly that’s wonderful!
Good one!
I was briefly stationed at Holloman AFB at Alamogordo in '82 and again in '85. Attended the space museum both times. By then Apollo was long over and the shuttle era was in full swing. The whole thing had that sorry feeling of trying to commemorate something that had been big then but was obsolescent and irrelevant now.
The atomic weapons museum at Kirtland in Albuquerque NM and the atomic testing museum in Las Vegas NV are both great for off-kilter kitsch. BTDT.
IIRC they had “I got bombed” t-shirts with pictures of mushroom clouds. Among other memorable stuff.
I wish I’d bought a lot more of them for all the hard to buy for people on my gift lists.
I have a “Hitler: European Tour” T-shirt, that I got in London in the mid-1980s.
It looks like any other rock group’s T-shirt: the band’s logo on the front (this one had Hitler doing a Nazi salute in front of a swastika), and on the back, a list of “tour dates.” In this case, they were:
September 1939: Poland
April 1940: Norway
May, 1940: Luxembourg
May, 1940: Belgium
And so on, as Germany conquered Europe, in the early parts of WWII.
I’ve never worn that T-shirt, and do not plan to. I certainly do not subscribe to Nazi ideology, but I had to get it, as it was so tacky and awful, that I just had to have it. So I bought it. For about GBP4.00 as I recall.
I continue to get a lot of use out of my “I 
London” coffee mug from that trip, however.
I have a “UFO License” that I bought about ten years ago at the Hoover Dam gift shop. I keep it in my wallet and pull it out jokingly when one of my coworkers at the grocery store asks to see my ID.
It looks like this except that mine says “Washington” instead of “Louisiana”.
I collect a rock from wherever we visit and when we get home I throw it in the rock garden. Means absolutely nothing to anyone else but amuses me to know I have a piece of soooooo many places.
A visitor to the Odessa Meteor Crater gifted me with a meteor crater t-shirt. It is one of my most cherished possessions.
Apparently the crater is one of Odessa, Texas’ top attractions. Possibly the only one.
My stepmother gave me a pair of those earrings from Yellowstone, and that’s what immediately sprang to mind! I threw them out when I moved out of my mom’s house.
My favorite souvenirs are a little Dutch doll with wooden shoes and a little French one in traditional costume. They’re nothing exceptional, but they have enormous sentimental value (you can take the wooden shoes off!).
I don’t collect any specific souvenirs, but I have a friend who used to collect regional snow globes (the cheaper and tackier, the better) and I used to get them for her if I saw a good one. She’s the proud owner of a Rattlesnake Museum one, in fact.
When I’m in NOLA I always buy my kids something from a VooDoo shop. I pay the extra few dollars to get the stuff blessed by a priest/priestess (only the best for my kids).
Why??? Why not commission original art?
I have several like this that my aunt brought back from her honeymoon in Europe in the late fifties. I recently repaired my Guardsman (?) doll. What are the guys with the shiny metal helmets with the floofy ponytail attached? I think they ride with the Queen/King during one or other of those ceremonials. I’ll never get rid of those dolls.
The worst I’ve seen is a JFK salt and pepper shaker.
The pepper comes out of his rocking chair, and the salt comes out of holes in the back of JFK’s head.
Too soon?
1962 was too soon. Anticipatory, perhaps.
Ouch, I thought the set was produced post assassination. Damn, who hired the pre-cog?
About the only actual tacky souvenir from a souvenir shop that I have is a very small Conch Republic flag from Key West (you could look it up.) But I treasure a cardboard coaster from the Cancun dive called Señor Frog’s that says “Please write your name and hotel. You might don’t remember it when you go out.” And also the cover of a pack of Kleenex from god-knows-where that says proudly “Oh, it’s a feh.”
A dude at my high school at the same shirt. It was only in the last class of the day that a teacher suggested he should not wear it to class.