A Tale Of Two Souvenirs

I’m not much of a souvenir person. I like bringing back a little something from places I go to remind myself, but so often the stuff there doesn’t strike me as actually “of” there. For example, many of the places I went in Egypt seemed to have bought their stock from a “Egypt store kit” catalog. Our guide even told us most of the stuff was made in China. I surprised myself on our recent Peru/Ecuador trip though and bought a souvenir. I bought a leather wrapped painted bottle.

(Note, not this one specifically, but pretty like it. Mine has white-tan leather rather than a dark brown, but the embossed designs are the same.)

Why did I buy it? It didn’t look like any of the stuff sold in any of the other stores I was seeing. It wasn’t mass manufactured t-shirts, mugs, shot glasses, diaries, or any of that with Ecuador/Galapagos printed on the front. It had Ecuador and Galapagos on it and was obviously semi-mass manufactured, but it looked like a leftover from the kitsch stuff they used to sell in the 70s, the kind of souvenir my parents would have gotten on one of their travels back then. It’s even a used liquor bottle inside, definitely actually used at one point since I can smell the old liquor (perhaps some kind of anise based liquor), the leather put together like some low budget craft project, definitely not anything like any of the other souvenirs I saw. At this point, it was kind of distinct.

I got it.

Of course, that was for Ecuador/Galapagos. If I bought something for that, I needed something for Peru. I couldn’t find anything.

Seriously, everything I saw was the same mass stuff that was in all of the shops. There was apparently a “Peru souvenir stand kit” catalog all the stands in all the cities we went to outfitted themselves from. Even the handicraft market in Cusco. I couldn’t find anything that felt like it would actually remind me of Peru in a way that felt like Peru as opposed to a generic tourism industry marked with Peru’s name.

That’s when I got the idea. I was drinking an Inca Kola on our last day in Cusco and I realized how much I’d come to associate Inca Kola with Peru. That felt real, whether it was real or not.

I took the empty bottle home as my Peru souvenir.