Lima, Peru

Friday, December 10, 2004:

Today I blissfully did nothing. If you were expecting something else, you were not paying attention to the heading or you think I am a liar. Which I take profound offense at.

In fact, I ambitiously woke up at 6 AM under the delusion that I would get an early start on the day and do something. I saw Laura off to her taxi to the airport, returned back to the room and, well, thought another 15 minutes of sleep couldn´t hurt me any. I woke up again at noon. I was hungry. I went for Chinese food which, for some odd reason, is unbelievably good in Lima. Its also dirt cheap, so $3 will get you something virtually gourmet.

I spent the afternoon wandering about Miraflores, examining the colonial-style buildings that were spattered about the place in a jumble with virtually any other style of architecture you could imagine. As I mentioned in the previous post, my hostal, the Witches House, is an enormous Tudor abomination that would look horrifically out of place were it not for the fact that there are so many other buildings that look horribly out of place in Lima. For the most part its not an ugly city, per se, but its definitely not what you would call beautiful. Basically, the whole of what I have seen of Lima is a hodge-podge of what the city once was (the center of a colonial empire, designed and arranged with conscientious regard for overall aesthetics and structured urban planning) mixed with everything that life threw in its way over the course of many years and an expansion into an 8 million person metropolis, much of it very poor.

The results are surreal, but not in the inspired way a Dali is. Purple sky-scrapers and orange-colored apartment complexes looming above colonial and baroque churches and public buildings? Gaudy, mismatched, bizarre but hardly inspired. And yet, while Miraflores has little to blow you away aesthetically, it is hardly boring to look at. Architecture aside, the crowds of people here are generally stylish, middle or upper-class sorts, hollering on their cell-phones during business lunches over lo-mein or cups of espresso in surprisingly chic cafes. But, as mentioned, there are plenty of signs of poverty and no shortage of children begging desperately for change or a bite of your food.

I spent some time checking out a few other hostals in Miraflores because I was not sure I wanted to deal with all of the noise I had noticed in the Witches House. Run by a group of young Israelis who never seem to leave the couch in front of their TV, they seem obsessed with watching American movies at full volume and seeing who can talk or shout the loudest over the dialogue in any one of a number of different languages. The funny thing is, everytime I pass one of them, he mumbles meekly, politely and quietly, as if on the verge of becoming a mute. Then, in the company of his 14 friends on the couch, he is calling them all "schmendrik" at 110 decibels. In any event, every other hostal I examine is more expensive and offers less in return. So I decide I can handle the racket of English, Hebrew, Russian and Yiddish at 1 AM.

For dinner I have Chinese food at the same restaurant --- like I said, its really good. I then spend a long evening working on the blog, trying to get caught up. Which is part of the reason why there´s nothing left for me to write here for the day.