Let me tell you about this picture, it's not how it looks!

I love this picture. I think this is objectively a great photograph.  We took this last week (Oct 2019) in Cusco, Peru.  I just feel it needs some explaining.  If I step outside myself (no, I didn’t do any Ayahuasca… which would have had that experience)… here is how the picture looks to me.

Come here weirdo native people, please. I know you are on your way to work, to likely toil somewhere that involves you taking home 50 pounds of bananas on your head.   Please, though, indulge me and the wifey with a picture.  I think your lowly poor hobbled existence is just adorable.  It will show all my friends back home how in touch we became with local culture.  I will tell our friends made up back stories about us all, and how we promised to keep in touch.

That, to me, is how all of these types of pictures look.  In a word… exploitative.

Doesn’t it?

Well, there was exploitation involved, but we were kinda more the victims.  Allow me to explain.  “No, there is too much.  Let me sum up.” – Inigo Montoya... who kinda looks Peruvian.

These ladies are full time tourist picture be-inners.  See, Peruvians in the city don’t dress like this.  They dress like you.  We did see ladies who genuinely dressed like this, but not on stoops in the city.  It was in drives through the countryside.

We were talking down the incredibly and brutally steep streets of Cusco looking at touristy is you can:  four white people wandering around with big ass backpacks. 

how steep?  That steep.  Not exactly 'to code'

I looked over and saw them on the stoop and made eye contact, because it was such an adorable site.  I nudge the wifey, and she looks over.  These astute capitalists ran over and literally handed my wife that… lamb?  “we take picture together?”, may have been their only English.  But, I did really want a picture like this, and I didn’t want to exploit the locals.  I even thought about sneaking a photo to try and capture a genuine moment, but took the high road.

Before we know it, we are sitting their with these wonderful ladies taking out picture taken.  “10 Soles?”.  Sole is the Peruvian dollar, and they were 3 to our dollar.  So, 10 soles is about $3.  Absolutely worth it.  I would have paid that just to take a picture of them, not to mention with them.  After the great photo, we give them 10 soles (do I capitalize the S there for currency?  Don’t know.  They say “20 soles!”.  I explain that is all I have (wifey and I both speak Spanish).  They start chasing us down the street yelling “20 soles.”  Obviously, we gave them an extra ten soles.  They made $7 in about 4 minutes.  Well done, ladies.  Happy to share the wealth.  As we walked around more, we saw several groups like this, sitting and being adorable with baby llamas and alpacas making themselves available for tourist photos.

Again, TOTALLY worth it to get that photo above.

For the record, I did sneak a photo of a genuine adorable real life Peruvian moment.  See this pic below. 

This is in Ollantaytambo, one of the gateway cities to Machu Picchu.  The father had a huge blanket set up selling wares to tourist.  This was his child, who likely spends hours a day there with his father.  Like any adorable child, he was bored and started playing a beautiful steel drum they had out for sale.  I can tell you it was a kid just being a kid, and not a kid trained to be adorable for tourists because after I got this shot his dad kinda yelled at him and told him to put the drum down.