5 Days in Lima, Peru! What's the city like?
Lima is not my favorite city to visit: it’s loud, its ugly, its expensive, and there’s shopping goddamn everywhere. The people are nice, and the food is delicious, however.
My “room” in the hostel: a bed with a little wooden table next to it and a light.
I stayed in a party hostel in Barranco, Kokopelli is the name, where I could hear the music from the bar in my room until two or three in the morning. I spent my time drinking beers and smoking cigarettes with a Canadian farmer, talking about love with an Iranian woman living in D.C., and reading Terry Pratchet and Douglas Adams, two of the few books in English from the little bookshelf in the hostel.
The square in El Centro Historico, a day after Christmas.
I also visited the historic center, El Centro Historico, which was basically a huge outdoor shopping mall with a pretty square and some old richly decorated Spanish Cathedrals lying around. I don’t even like Cathedrals, they kind of disgust me. Colonialism, sure, awful, we know, but spiritually they seem to all represent the exact opposite of Jesus’ message. I don’t feel an inch of spirituality, of presence, of peace, in those yawning caverns of idiocy. I stared at a woman in a pretty red dress with white flowers, admiring her for what she was: a human, and a milf at that, and she looked at me and then crossed herself!
I tried to meditate in the pew, but it's so uncomfortable. And the air was buzzing with some kind of nervous tension, like when you’re waiting for something and trying really hard to be patient but aren’t doing a great job holding it in and your mom or grandma smacks you on the back of the head to stop fidgeting. That’s how I felt it, at least.
I took the bus to get there: it’s an interesting system that runs similar to the subway where you have stations, a special card that you tap leading through a turnstile, and then you wait on the boarding platform. But then instead of a train, a bus stops in front, and runs in its own special lane built in the middle of the highway. We packed in there like sardines, everyone sweating and uncomfortable. I got off at central station, an underground brightly tiled hallway (Northbound on one side, Southbound on the other) with little food stalls lining the sides. Going up there’s a small Museum of Italian art—the quietest place in all of Lima, perhaps—some parks, and then a short walk to a huge outdoor shopping mall. Further past was the Centro Historico with its old colonial buildings and churches. Walking through the streets sometimes someone will incessantly try to give you a flyer or sell you something and I always felt a little rude ignoring them, but you kind of have to.
One shopping center brings to mind another! In Miraflores (running north to south right on the coast you have the neighborhoods of the Historic Center, San Isidro, Miraflores, and Barranco, and these are the nicest and most expensive places in the city, where tourists generally stay) overlooking the ocean, the beautiful ocean, is an outdoor shopping mall with restaurants, cafes, ice cream shops, overpriced clothing and shoe stores, and gift shops filled with ‘authentic’ little gismos and Peruvian looking art, cloth, and stuffed llamas. Tell me why I saw more tourists here (mas blancos) than anywhere else? The shopping, oh the shopping. White people are so vain. Maybe some people are simply shopping tourists and they travel to see the different kinds of malls around the world. I’m sure there is some kind of art to it, the designing of plastic souvenirs that dumb foreigners will pay out the ass for.
Now I must say here that although I may appear to be writing as if I am only talking about other people, I am myself a “dumb white person.” Sadly. I’m working on my spanish and my tan as you read this. For there is something else I noticed regarding the aesthetic sensibilities of foreigners and the Peruvian bourgeoisie. I put these two together because these are the customers I notice in these types of places, but also because such is the way of globalisation. The tourists in one country—especially the shoppers—are often the bourgeoisie in another.
Street art in Barranco
In neighborhoods like Barranco and Miraflores (and probably San Isidro though I’ve never been), there are two types of eateries. One looks like your typical restaurant, i.e. you look at it (and if you’ve been properly trained) think, “ah, that’s a restaurant.” Maybe it has a printed menu on the wall, a host standing outside, a patio w/ tables, a big and clear name on the building, or an interior of a certain shape and table layout that couldn’t be anything but a cafe or a restaurant. The decorations are all new and shiny and point towards a certain theme or color scheme, maybe there are sofa’s if it’s a cafe, or plants if it’s outside, and even the tables are polished wood and the chairs unvarnished.
The other kind is bland, ugly even. They’re square rooms with short ceilings, tiled floors, and the entrance isn’t a doorway, but the absence of the garage door that’s raised upon its opening for business. There is a grid-placed selection of two and four person tables, typically beige or off-white and covered in scratches, and a tiny counter from behind which the single host stands to take your order and run food back from the kitchen. There is a black chalkboard outside with the whole menu on it. It’s a thing, actually, they have for lunch what’s called Menú. For one price you get to select an appetizer—a kind of salad, soup, ceviche, or maybe potatoes in a creamy yellow pepper sauce; a main course—usually some kind of meat or fish, either stir-fried or breaded and fried and served with rice or pasta; and then maybe a choice of drink, or, you get slightly honeyed water that looks like piss.
“
An Ode to Leche de Tigre
I ate some today
Out of a thick glass goblet:
Little squares of purple onion
(I know it’s technically red, but it’s not red)
Shrimp And varieties of whitefish
I hope came from the ocean
So close I can almost smell it
It asked me to write a poem about it
As I put down another poem
About a high opera note held in the air
As the slightly spicy milk full of chunks
Slid down my throat
Its not real tigers milk! That’s just a silly name
Although the first time I saw it on a menu
I believed that it was
That somewhere in the Amazon
Was a farm with lady tigers
Lounging by the water
Breasts full and sore
Waiting to be milked
Or maybe it was wild tigers I imagined
And they had to be captured
By a stealthy hunter, milked,
And released back into the wild
All so that we could eat fish
I paid 38 soles for some in a cevichería
Presented with sliced spicy peppers
Thin slivers of purple onion
And thick orange rounds of sweet potato
All laid out in a wide concave plate
I paid 10 soles for some in a street cart
The raw fish sitting in a plastic display case
Among the crunchy corn and onion and limes
And a small old woman prepared it for me
Tasting the sauce off her plastic blue glove
And I paid 10 soles for some and a main course
Of rice, stir fried meat, onions, and peeled tomato
The only gringo
Surrounded by workers on lunch break
And the fish was gray like it had been cooked
Or sitting in lime all day long
It is a delicate thing of balance
The fishiness, the sourness, the salt, the spice, they sing together, Like a soprano, I think,
For it is light yet punchy and pointed
And not at all shy
”
I make this distinction between the two types of establishments not to shit on the ladder, but quite the opposite, for the quality and flavor of the food itself is pretty often comparable between the two. Maybe the portions are a little smaller, and you get fewer options, but man the food is really tasty. At these smaller places it costs 10-18 soles for a full meal. That’s somewhere between 3 and 5 American dollars. While those establishments attracting clientele with a more fine aesthetic sensibility will charge you 30-50 soles for just the appetizer. Kind of astounding price difference, and they’ll be right around the block from each other.
I do in fact make this distinction because I believe that it’s simply the aesthetics that justify the price difference and pull in poor suckers like myself. It’s looks will attract foreigners who are new to the area and scared of dirtier looking places and of venturing off somewhere not reviewed on Google Maps, and also locals living in these ritzy neighborhoods who want to appear rich or simply because they want to have a nice meal out and be comfortable with a pretty view. Neither of which you can really blame them for. I just found this little observation and my theory behind it amusing. And! For anyone traveling to Lima, don’t hesitate to wander somewhere dirty looking and full of locals. The food will be amazing. And it’s worth it for a little bit of diarrhea.
I’m writing these from the sierras outside of Lima, in nature, where I’ll be volunteering the next month. Looking forward to telling you all about it :)
Feliz Nuevo Ano Amigos!
-Andy
