The good, the bad, and the quirky

Instead of the whistling and the other instruments in “The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly” theme music, imagine this post being set to that music but played by the Andean flute-pipe instrument. More appropriate!

The good: 

The food: From the sopas, huevos, and nearly every cena (dinner) at the señora’s house to the crema de zapallo (squash soup) at the Hare Krishna restaurant, the falafel/hummus at Café Beirut, and the chicken and salsas at the pollería down the street from our apartment, the food is incredible and delicious. We have eaten fantastic food. We even found a Mexican restaurant that is as good and as authentic as our favorite Indy restaurant. I want to take cooking classes to try to more accurately replicate the Peruvian flavors in our home here.

Pisco sours are the drink of choice here and we are enjoying sampling them around the city. Pisco is grape brandy, and to make the sours you add simple syrup, lime juice, and a beaten egg white. Dangerously delicious!

Don't worry, Simon is enjoying his water, not his own pisco!

This bar, just off of a square in Lima’s downtown, is our favorite to date. Sam’s also enjoyed the pisco sour that our language school offered as a congratulations to each student upon finishing their studies – a lovely tradition, no?


Parks are everywhere, tucked in between side streets, along the oceanfront, in the spaces between apartment buildings. Most are small. Some of them have exciting things like stones that we can step up and down on; one near us actually has a sandbox that the youngest member of our family particularly enjoys. The parks are fabulous and a constant source of amusement as well as beauty.

The bad: La contaminacion, the pollution, is horrible. Plumes of black smoke billow from nearly every vehicle on the street. Awful and relentless. And somehow people still smoke cigarettes! 


We live on a really busy street and although there is a tall wall separating us from the street, there's no separating the air. A couple of days after moving into our apartment, we were trying to figure out what this black stuff was that we were somehow tracking around the floor. And even after sweeping and mopping the floor, it's still not clean; I often take a napkin to pick up food that Simon's thrown onto the floor and it's black after touching the floor. Finally we realized the blackness  was all the dirt and soot and black air particles that filter down and covering the floor. Oh. 


So while we can clean every day, we can't really adjust how we breathe. We’re more than a little worried that all this exposure will result in asthma for Simon, but we’re also not sure what to do otherwise. Tips?

The quirky:

La ciudad morada: During the entire month of October, Lima celebrated El Señor de los Milagros, or el cristo morado (The Christ of the Miracles, or the Purple Christ). There’s an icon that was brought out four times and paraded through different routes of the city. Women got up very early those mornings and covered the pavement for the entire route with flower petals. And it’s not just a beautiful carpet of flower petals; detailed images from Christ’s life were designed with these petals. Impressive! I haven’t seen these for myself; these routes were far too crowded for us to get anywhere near them. Anyway, what I see as the endearing and quirky part are the clothes. People wore purple clothing as a sign of their penitence during October. It might be a purple scarf, it might be a purple dress, but there was purple everywhere. I would estimate I saw purple on every third person. The snappiest version I saw was on a businessman – light purple dress shirt, dark purple silk tie, black suit.

The call of the wild: On our first afternoon in Lima, we kept hearing this strange, loud call from down the street. It sounded like a weird animal, possibly in pain. My bet was on an ostrich; Sam thought it was more likely a peacock. I just hoped that it wouldn’t cry all night like that. We didn’t know what was normal for Lima – maybe everyone had a pet ostrich. I finally asked the señora what that sound was. It’s the ice cream man, blowing through his funky horn as he pedals his freezer of treats on his bicycle. Right. Slightly more plausible than a pet peacock. 

So the ice cream calls are very much a part of the background music of the day. And they swarm places where there are kids. When school gets out, there might be four of them pedaling through the parental traffic. The parks invariably have one or two cycling through. I want one of the horns, not the ice cream. While I'm at it, that bicycle looks pretty awesome too; look at all that frozen storage space! Hmm, maybe that is what I need to peddle my homemade ice cream while pedaling around Indy...

Which llama? We were looking at a statue in central Lima that has a woman’s figure at the base. She has a llama, the animal llama, on her head!

Apparently the word for flame in Spanish is llama, just like the word for the animal, and when the order for a statue with a llama on her head came in, the workers didn’t really think too much about it, they just put a llama on her head as directed. Here’s a closer view.

Our doors: We live in the ground floor apartment and there is a family that lives above us. We each have a separate entrance to our homes, with separate keys, from the street. They both open onto the same patio/parking space. None of us uses the other's door from the street. Why don't we just have one door? Weird!

The doors that open from the street onto the patio/parking space

Simon shows off which door is ours