Sunny day in Lima (not!)

OK, I haven’t seen the sun in about 5 days and now I’m at the stage that I’m avoiding sharp objects in the hotel room and avoiding being too close to wide-open windows in tall buildings. When things are so gloomy and depressing, one cannot be too careful.

We have been in Lima, Peru since Sunday morning and our arrival coincided with the arrival of Lima’s winter doldrums. The sky is dark grey, fog permeates everything and mixes with the exhaust from the buses to the point that you don’t know which is which, the air is cool but the kind of cool that is not really that cold at first but after a day or two it becomes so impregnated in the environment and in your clothes that it makes your bones tremble and clatter. Like many other cities of this size (8 million) most people in the street dress the part. Not with lively bright colors as in Miami, but dark hues of grey that better match the sky and the smog than a tropical beach anywhere. Not a very fun place to be if this happens to be your only destination but I’m looking forward to visiting with our son in Cusco for the weekend. I don’t care where he is but please let it be sunny!

After a few visits to Lima in the last couple of years, still it’s not as if I know how to go directly to the public library as I do in the other US cities that we usually frequent. For one thing, libraries are not your main tourist attraction so they are not found in the tourist maps or advertised in the hotel’s city guides. So I end up hanging at the several bookstores found in the nice section of town where we usually stay (Miraflores). One section of the bookstores that is always interesting is the cookbook section. There are all kinds of large colorful books on Peruvian cuisine. They usually have close-up pictures of the foods detailed inside and browsing them makes for a great pastime. If I do that a couple of hours before the next meal it works wonders on my appetite and makes the search for the next restaurant an adventure. This city is known for its ceviche and tasted a great variety of them I self-proclaimed myself as a 'ceviche connoisseur'. And of course to keep with my reputation, this week I have already done a fair sampling of their delicious adaptations in a number of venues.

The sampling started on Sunday right after the airport. A local friend invited us to eat at the Marriott Hotel across from Larco Mar, an affluent shopping center built right off the cliffs in front of the Pacific Ocean. I was pleasantly impressed with their all-you-can-eat buffet of typical Peruvian cuisine. It didn’t help that the buffet also included refills of their famous Pisco Sour drinks so by the third trip to the buffet table I had to be extra careful that I didn’t trip on the steps and made a fool of myself. The best thing about it was that in addition to all their offerings, they had a ‘ceviche bar’ where a chef would custom-make your ceviche on the spot. The chef had several types of fresh fish and seafood cut in cubes, finely-cut red onions, spicy red pepper, Peruvian corn and chunks of sweet potato and he would mixed them per your request and top the product with plenty of ‘Leche de Tigre’ (spiced lemon juice) to cure it all. I normally stay away from hotel restaurants but having this experience definitely made me a little more open minded about the possibilities.

It’s about 11AM right now and I must be heading to the nearest bookstore to start the process in preparation for my next meal. Hopefully I’ll get to browse a book about sunny tropical beaches to enliven my spirits a little as I continue the arduous task of sampling all the ceviche that Lima can muster.

Hoping for a sunny (ceviche-filled) day tomorrow, I remain.