Estamos en Peru!
After 2 short flights and a loong layover in Costa Rica, we are in Lima, Peru.
We spent our first two nights in Miraflores, a suburb of Lima where there’s apparently more going on. We walked around our new neighborhood, which has a bunch of casinos, churros and money changers on almost every corner, they supposedly give you a better deal. I changed my dinero at the casaac de cambio, which is sort of in between a bank and a guy on the street. I’m not ready to haggle for changing money yet.
On our first real day, we walked almost the entire day. Hooray for my new sneakers, Saucony Jazz lo-pro. My feet don’t hurt yet and I don’t feel jet lagged. We walked along the cliffs, where it was basically a well maintained park friendly to walkers, bikers, runners and dog-owners. It is nice to see people walking everywhere or on crowded buses. We visited the Parque de Amor, which is along the ocean side cliffs and has a giant sculpture of people making out. There’s also a handful of couples at the park, also making out. There’s a beautiful Gaudi tiled bench system in the park that reminded me of Parque Guell, designed by Gaudi in Barcelona. We wandered around town, ate at a Hare Krishna place where we had a 3 course lunch for about $3. We took an afternoon siesta and then saw La Borgia at the movies. While buying the tickets, the woman made sure we knew it was in Spanish, she seemed worried about us going in there. It wasn’t easy to understand–not only Castellano spanish, but more like Spanish Inquisition Castellano. I know we got the plot and some of the dialogue. Not bad for Day 1. It was all about the Borgia family and their rise to power. It’s amazing how the Catholic Church can be seen as so conservative now, usually with history it’s the past that was puritanical. This guy, Rodrigo Borgia became the pope, had lots of sex with young girls, his daughter and he encouraged his sons to basically rape and pillage people all the time. Maybe my Spanish isn’t up to par yet, but that’s what I got from the film.At night we took a taxi to Barranco, another suburb of Lima on the cliffs. It has more colonial architecture and is more of a party scene than Miraflores (which didn’t seem like much of a party scene). Within 5 minutes of us getting out of the taxi, we were offered weed, coke, and free pisco sours. Instead, we walked around the plaza, looked in at the bars and settled on Outre Mama bar, with live Afro-Peruvian music. I’m not totally familiar with the money here yet, basically one us dollar is about 3 nuevo soles. Only they writes the money like this sl. 15 equals 15 soles. I went to order some wine, the menu said sl.55 and my eyes tell me it’s 1.55 soles for a glass of wine (it didn’t say it was by the bottle, every thing else on the menu was by the drink) so i ordered TWO things of wine….me thinking I’m getting this great deal for a glass of wine (50 cents a glass!) Ha, ha. Luckily I figured my mistake while they were corking the bottle and was able to talk them into letting me just buy a glass. I’m sure they were disappointed to find out I was a cheap gringa. Oh, well. It was Peruvian wine and I didn’t really like it. It was very alcoholic and high in sugar, not too much depth or tannins.
Now we are in central Lima, which feels more like Madrid than anything. Lots of old buildings with great colonial architecture and plaza everywhere. We had a 3 course vegetarian lunch today for $2. We were stuffed. Corn (the biggest kernels in the world) stew, emoliente (a sweet herbal tea which I’m sure has aloe vera juice in it. it’s quite viscous), fake meat stewed with rice, corn, and more ingredients than I can remember. Dessert was strawberry yogurt. The side we ordered was mushroom ceviche which was amazing. Lots of lime juice, salt, cilantro and mushrooms and some soy protein on top of a bed of sweet potatoes. I think I’ll be full for a long time.
Now we are off to see more of Lima and hopefully meet up with Effie’s cousin, who lives here. By the way, soft serve ice cream cones here are one nuevo sole. Oh, how it tempts me!