Welcome to our neighborhood

Something I have noticed about Lima is the tendency to group stores and products together in specific regions, perhaps for easier comparison shopping. Such as: one street downtown has store after store after store selling only copy machines. If you want fabric, you go to Gamarra, where there are approximately one million stores all appearing to sell the same bolts of fabric. And so with our neighborhood, Santa Cruz, at one end of the larger neighborhood of Miraflores. Its specialty appears to be ceviche and car repair shops.


The two are an interesting combination. Ceviche, raw fish in lime juice (I say "fish cooked in lime juice", Sam says "raw fish marinated in lime juice"), served with sweet potato and a cob of corn, is practically Peru's national dish. I read that there are 3,000 cevicherías in Lima alone, let alone the rest of the country.

You can get it at any price point throughout Peru. (You know how vendors get on the long-distance buses to sell you prepared food during the journey? When we were traveling from Máncora, a vendor got on to sell ceviche for several soles, a bargain. But I am too chicken to try raw fish from a vendor on a bus!)


The cevicherías in our neighborhood tend towards the high end of the price point possibilities. They are mostly all located on Avenida La Mar, which is near to - but not actually on - la mar (the ocean). Cevicherías are only open during the afternoon, 12-5ish, and they always seem to be packed. Our friends Tom and Andrea visited in December, giving us an excuse to finally go to one of the cevicherías near our apartment.

A review in the Washington Post describes Santa Cruz as run down. And it certainly has that feeling in areas. But the cevicherías have a different feel to them. Valet parking, security guards with walkie-talkies, beautifully dressed women with impossibly high heels getting out of SUVs - I'm not sure I possess the cool factor (let alone the money!) to go to the more expensive ones.

In contrast, the car repair shops lend a junky, shabby feeling to Santa Cruz. Guard dogs patrol, there are stripped cars on the streets, and the sketch factor is high.

Santa Cruz is a microcosm of Lima. And to say that Lima is a study in contrasts is an understatement. It certainly makes exploring interesting, however.