Juan was here

With tours, I learned that what competes with amazing artifacts is not another amazing artifact. It's the photo ops, the never ending poses and self-choreographed blocking. Tourists, remained simply like that, tourists. Not learners, not heritage enthusiasts. Not even amateur art critics nor folk hero supporters. Not even just a curious group eager to know what makes the collective past significant. What makes stories interesting, what makes people unique.

Seemingly most tours end up as purveyors of picture-taking bunch of warm bloods competing for space in any corner conceivable. Objectives 1,2 and 3 - immortalize a face no matter how skewed, how under exposed, how badly composed the photo will end up to be. I pity museums. Seemingly, they no longer become an avenue for historical interest, for knowledge acquisition, for wanting to know cultural identities. They turned out to be just another backdrop, another evidence for "Juan was here."