South America, Day 2: Lima, Peru

South America, Day 2: Lima, Peru
by Oliver Butterick

Even though we broke a few rules last night, I didn’t pay for it any more than I would have back home. Actually, I awoke thinking the same thing I did during my last trip: “Why is my pillow as hard as a brick???” We’ve been here barely twelve hours and I’m already hung over. What a great start.

We had breakfast at the hostel, and I figured, “What the heck? Why not break another rule?” I drank some of the juice, which probably contained unboiled tap water. I only had a few sips and ended up not getting sick, so “no harm, no foul.” After breakfast, we decided to walk the kilometer or two to the Museo de la Nacion instead of taking a cab.

The museum was pretty cheap, only costing 3 soles, or about $1US. The exhibits consisted mostly of archaeological specimens from different regions in Peru. There was a lot of pottery and some large murals that had been excavated. The most interesting pieces were:

1. An entire burial chamber of a man who had been a governor of Peru while it was under Spanish rule. Buried with him were a servant boy and his dog (probably both still alive or recently sacrificed at the time of burial) along with nearly a hundred ceramic vases. I didn’t quite catch their symbolism, but I’m sure they were important.

2. A small ceramic statuette, about twelve inches in height. The most prominent feature of the statuette was its life-sized genitals. Larger than any of its arms or legs, its size in proportion to the rest of the statuette made me feel slightly inadequate. Stealing a line from the movie Goldmember, I named the statuette “Tripod.”

After browsing the book sale outside the museum, we took a taxi to central Lima, with the intent of doing some shopping. Our cab driver spoke some English and was very funny in describing the various places we could visit in and around Lima. Most humorous was when he asked us if we wanted to go to a “nightclub.” Being that it was Friday afternoon, and we didn’t have any plans for the evening, we were excited to hear about all of the “nightclubs.” Even through the language barrier, it didn’t take us long to realize that what Peruvians call “nightclubs” are not what one would refer to as a nightclub in the States. Rather, a “nightclub” is a brothel. The cab driver went into great detail describing the services offered by the “nightclubs,” along with the wide price range. He advised us to use great caution should we decide to go to one of the cheaper establishments. We declined his offer to drive us to a “nightclub,” since we were much more interested in finding a nightclub, or “discoteca” for that evening’s festivities.

We arrived in central Lima, and found a bank so that I could change some money and be less dependant upon my traveling companions. That took about half an hour and by then we were getting hungry. We consulted the guidebook and decided to try “L’Eau Vive,” a French vegetarian restaurant run by nuns. Unfortunately, it did not reopen for dinner for another two hours, so we found another vegetarian restaurant down the street. It was not exclusively a vegetarian restaurant, so we had to make sure what was in the dishes we ordered. (Rocky is a vegetarian, though he does eat chicken from time to time, and Tesh is about the same, but had already decided that he was open to trying other foods while traveling.) I ended up with a spaghetti dish with spinach sauce. It was good, but not very flavorful, so I lost my taste for it about halfway through the meal. Rocky ordered a “saltado” dish, which ended up becoming our default meal whenever we couldn’t decide what to order. I believe “saltado” means something like “stir-fry,” and you can get it with many different types of meat, or with none at all.

By the time we left the restaurant, it was already 6:00pm, and we had been warned not to walk around central Lima after that time because it’s not entirely safe, especially for tourists. We caught a cab back to the hostel, and I tried to take a nap since we had made plans to go out at 9:00 with our new friend Becky, a 23-year-old British girl who has been traveling on her own throughout South America for the past five months.

We headed out to an Irish pub in Miraflores. We arrived around 9:30 and the bar was completely dead. After debating whether or not to even go inside, I suggested that we go in, have a drink, and then decide if we want to go somewhere else. We ordered a round of Pisco Sours, the national drink of Peru. Unfortunately, it meant breaking yet another rule: the drinks contained ice! The nurse at the travel clinic would be very disappointed in me.

After the Pisco Sours, we started pounding beers. We had decided to stay because a few people started trickling in when a band set up a table out front and started charging a cover. The sign said that the band, “The Emergency Blanket,” was scheduled to perform at 10:00pm. They finally took the stage just after midnight when we were sufficiently tossed. The bar was crowded by this time, and the crowd was quite into the band. We stayed through their set before piling into a cab to go back to the hostel.

When the four of us got back to the hostel, Tesh and I came up with the brilliant idea of heading back out to get some food. We grabbed a taxi and told the driver to take us to a restaurant. Five minutes later, we were at a restaurant and Tesh had pretty much passed out in the back seat of the car. However, he woke up right away and we went inside. We ordered beers (another brilliant idea!) and a plate of chicken and rice for each of us, which we enjoyed immensely, probably because we were drunk. Tesh kept trying to take a nap at the restaurant, so we quickly paid our bill and got into a cab to go back to the hostel.

I fell asleep the second my head hit my pillow. In the morning, we would discover that sometime while Tesh and I went out to get food, he lost a rather important object, and that loss would take us on quite an adventure...

Oliver can be reached at oliver@babblog.com.