Peru Day 1: Lima
I just returned this past week from a two week vacation in Peru. Every day for the next two weeks, I’ll post my observations from the trip. Today I’ll post the first in the series.
Day 1: Lima –This entry was written on May 8, 2006.
Lima is an amazing city. We’re staying in the hotel Jose Antonio, in the Mira Flores neighborhood. It’s a fairly new neighborhood with lots of shopping and and active mall along the ocean. It has a really nice character to it, although the mall is a bit touristy, what with a KFC and a Pizza Hut mixed in with the variety of shops. Nonetheless, the ocean and the fog and the Spanish-influenced architecture strongly remind me of home.
We took a tour of the city in the afternoon. Seeing some of the various neighborhoods, Lima is a remarkable city. It’s 9 million people spread out in 42 neighborhoods, spanning 40 by 20 miles. Some of the neighborhoods are quite nice, with a real middle or even upper class feel to them. Others are quite a bit more sketchy, with a shanty town on the hillside the looks like it would keep the red cross busy for years of even a small earthquake.
We also visited an old Franciscan monastery, which has been opened to the public. It has a fantastic outer cloister with a beautifully kept garden in it. Everything was so ornately decorated, from the wood carvings on the ceilings and furniture to the frescoes and murals on the walls. Underneath, we visited the catacombs, where many of the Spanish colonialists were buried. Their bones were neatly arranged for the tourists, but the concepts behind them were authentic–pits full of bones of buried bodies in pit after pit, cavern after cavern. When one filled up, it was sealed off and another used. Some individual pits went 30 feet deep! It was like something out of Diablo!
For lunch, we went to this restaurant called Alfresco, with the most amazing octopus dish. The tentacles were perfectly blanched, then seasoned with cumin, rosemary, and olive oil, and grilled to perfection. It was quite possibly the best seafood that I have ever had–in the Bay Area, Seattle, or in New England.