Christmas Visiting

My apologies that this post is longer than normal. There was just so much that went on over the last month that I just haven't posted.

 The weekend before our Christmas visitors arrived, Jen and Carter ran in a race over by the Lima golf club. Jen ran 8k, while Carter sprinted in the 7-9 year old group mini race.

Lois and Laurie arrived the week before Christmas, relieving Carter's incessant anticipation of their arrival. Shortly thereafter, our good friends Tonya and Chad arrived, so we had a nice full contingent here for Christmas.

Prior to the arrival of Tonya and Chad though, we did a few things with Lois and Laurie. They have a ton of pictures, but I will make do with a couple of Google images.

Carter and I took them to the gold museum on that Friday. On Saturday, we went down and wandered around the colonial heart of Lima, taking a carriage ride around the Plaza de Armas. We stumbled into a free exhibition of Nativity scenes (many homes do elaborate nativities and, of course, artists and sculptors have taken the idea to dramatic lengths)...there was even a folk-music band in the courtyard. As it got dark, we headed over to the water park which instead of water slides features artful fountains lit up to great effect. Some fountains are clearly for cooling off on a warm summer night, and the park is full of families and couples walking around, playing in the water, and watching the laser & movie projections on sheets of water. Jennifer's inner-child is never far from the surface, so of course she and Carter were squealing in the fountain. Many formally dressed girls are there to take their quinceañera photos (15yr old girls have a big coming-of-age celebrations). After the park, we sat on plastic stools behind one of the many informal street carts outside and enjoyed some tasty anticucho de pollo (grilled chicken skewers).

At 1am that night, Jen and I picked up Chad & Tonya, got a quick pisco sour into them and got to bed in time to get up on Sunday and go to Punta Sal for a cebiche lunch overlooking the palisades in Miraflores. We walked down the steps to the surf area and out on the pier, after which I took the abuelos and Carter home while Jen stayed with Chad & Tonya for a seaside drink. 
 

On the 24th, Chad and I went early to the fresh market to pick up seafood for a fabulous cioppino for dinner. While there we could not resist having some cebiche at the stand we love there, even though it was 10am. The guys working the stand laughed when we promised to come back for lunch...and laughed even more when we did, in fact, return a few hours later with Tonya and Jen. The market is packed as people shop for Christmas (actually, all Lima seems packed with shoppers) and December is notorious for an increase in theft. In fact, just the week prior, Mariza and I witnessed someone steal a backpack at that market...chased by the angry owners.

Our Christmas Eve cioppino was fabulous and sent us to bed with visions of crawdads dancing in our heads. I snuck out to buy some things for Jen's stocking, having forgotten for yet another year. The streets were deserted except for clumps of street vendors and poor kids sitting on curbs waiting for neighborhood fireworks after having worked up to the very last minute. Since Peruvians celebrate late into Christmas Eve, by midnight the neighborhood became a bombast of high-caliber fireworks. At points it looked like daylight outside, and our car alarm kept whimpering. Carter somehow slept through it all.

Christmas Day, after all the unwrapping, etc., Chad cooked yet again. It was a relaxing day around home, playing Apples to Apples and having fun with some of Carter's presents. Early the next morning, Laurie & Lois & Carter boarded a bus for Paracas so they could experience the fun down there, going to see all the birds and renting kayaks (see my post of our previous trip down there). Jen, Chad, Tonya & I took the opportunity to check into a old-school hotel over in San Isidro, wanting the chance to be closer to explore some of the great restaurants that Lima offers. During this time, we took them to Huaca Pucllana (click here for earlier post) and the unprotected Wari burial ground 130km south of the city (click here for earlier post). On the way back from the burial ground we stopped at Asia beach, Lima's beach destination. The little restaurant worried us when the server opened 4 bottles of warm beer and brought them over with glasses of ice...luckily, the food was very tasty and we mimicked the other patrons who went next door and bought cold beers to go. A pleasant walk on the beach afterwards featured various seabirds and even dolphins.

Restaurants visited included Pescados Capitales ("Capital Fish" or by removing the 's': "Capital Sins", a humorous fish restaurant with a theme of sin). The fire-grilled octopus was simple and amazing. Panchita, a popular restaurant of Peru's culinary superstars Astrid y Gaston, specializing in amazing grilled meat, also introduced us to the algarrobina...a cocktail made from the syrup of a Peruvian tree. One night we met up with Julio and Maureen at Huaringas, technically a bar, but in addition to their fabulous pisco sour menu, the appetizers were culinary delights as well. Friday, Lois & Laurie & Carter returned.

Saturday was pretty mellow, with a visit to our local weekly organic market. Chad & Tonya had a very late flight out of Lima, so after Carter was in bed, we took them out for one last culinary experience...amazing steak at El Hornero not far from our house.

With Tonya & Chad gone, I joined Lois and Laurie for a visit to an exhibit of the 2 decades of internal strife in Peru, put together by their truth and reconciliation committee. It was a powerful insight into those years of terror and strife, roughly 1980-2000. Pictures of mass graves, bomb sites, students disappeared forever into the trunks of police cars, peasants and community activists killed by cadres supposedly fighting for the people. It would take a dedicated blog to cover it all, so I won't even try here. The exhibit leads you around the top floor of the National Museum, with all the photos and gauze covered windows. The second-to-last room is 6 or 8 of photos of the missing, with the audio testimony from their loved ones all playing at once, creating a murmuring coalescence of loss. And then you step into the last room which simply has a bench looking out a window finally without gauze, past the large buildings and kids playing in the street and up to the slum climbing the hill to the north. Powerful.

That night, after just about everyone headed off to bed, Laurie went out for a late-night "trudge", his version of power-walking exercise. He had done this earlier, just about getting lost, but finally looping all the way around the agrarian university until people directed him to our street. In our part of town, you just can't rely on walking a loop...it's just too irregular. So on this trip he ended up on the other side of the big hill where he met a family who helped him out with directions and finally drove him home. It was one of those rare experiences in which he made a kind of contact with locals not given to most tourists. The man told Laurie he used to be a policeman, even pointing to a house not 2 blocks down our street as being the famous house that American Lori Berenson rented and was found full of MRTA revolutionaries after her arrest. Coming on the heels of seeing the exhibit of the Truth & Reconciliation Committee, it was pretty mind-blowing for Laurie.

Monday was New Years Eve, for which Jen had heard that being down on the palisades in Miraflores was a great place to watch midnight fireworks. So we headed out to the Larco Mar mall where we could go to the movies and try to stay up late enough. Even after the movies, we still had a couple hours to kill and all the cafes and restaurants seemed to be prebooked. So we waited up at the little playground where Jen and Carter gathered a crew of kids for a late night game of tag. Just before midnight, the city erupted with fireworks. They may not have been the very biggest I've ever seen, but still pretty darn big and thw quantity being shot off up and down the coast was amazing. Not only that, but one set was being shot off right next to us...exploding just a few stories above our heads. On the drive home, the whole city seemed to be one cloud of firework haze.

The rest of the week was a chance for Lois and Laurie to do several of the things that we have enjoyed. Saturday they checked into their hotel with their grand tour starting on Sunday. Right now they are up in the Machu Picchu area.