Wow - I left Lima yesterday and I hadn't even posted anything about it while I was there! I guess that's partly due to a lack of big events/moments; Lima has been a city of much, much walking and thinking, and not a lot of real site-seeing or even much socializing. But you know what? I have really enjoyed it. I like Lima. It's kinda gotten a bad rep for being a place where the weather is meh and there isn't much to do, but once I stopped expecting sunny weather like I knew and loved in Colombia, it's grown on me quite a bit. In fact, the constant gray, overcast weather and proximity to the Pacific coast remind me of home. Maybe that's why I find myself very comfortable here -- it's not particularly exciting or picturesque once you get away from the coastline, but for one's daily routine (considering things like safety, modern buildings, good value for food and lodging), I can see how Lima would be a great place to live.
Safety: Lima might be the safest place I have ever been. It is clean, and modern, and there are notably few homeless people around. In fact, I can't recall seeing any. Now I'm curious about how that's possible... there could be something to learn from this place.
Pisco Sours: I arrived in Lima on a Saturday night. Somehow I've ended up traveling on Saturdays which makes it hard to rally and have the energy for going out on Saturday nights. However, I decided to break my usual pattern of staying in on my first night, and I ventured out on the town to experience Lima on a weekend night. I told myself I'd consider it a success as long as I tried a pisco sour. Success was achieved!
Social life: I've discovered that, as a solo traveler, there is a constant push-pull between the need for space to walk, reflect, do exactly what I want to do and go exactly where I want to go, on my own terms, in my own time, and the need to connect with other humans and be open to allowing and accepting all the aspects of those interactions that I cannot control. You know, the stuff that makes people fascinating, beautiful, fun, complicated and occasionally annoying and/or messing with the schedule of restaurants and site-seeing I was planing on. The balance between me-time and social time at home is different because social time is still time spent with people I know I will enjoy spending time with, but when your only option for social time is with complete strangers, it's more of a gamble. So it can be hard sometimes to motivate myself to be more social when it is so easy to have a good time, a fine, mellow, pleasant time in the company of my own self.
I haven't gotten lonely so far, but being alone all the time is usually not a very dynamic experience. It's easy to be at peace by yourself, I think, because your mood can be left relatively undisturbed at a consistent, manageable, content-but-not-ecstatic level. In contrast, relationships -- of any nature -- offer the possibility for shared joy, which means amplified joy, and there's something about sharing an experience with someone that makes it feel more real, as though the fact that it is now stored in someone else's consciousness, doubly recorded, doubly witnessed, makes it more significant than when it's just in my own.
Sharing experiences also create an opportunity for awkwardness, disappointment, and irritation, and sometimes I'll find myself committed to spending time with someone and wishing I was by myself. And then I'll be by myself, wishing I had put more effort into meeting people and getting comfortable investing time and energy into exploring these brief roll-of-the-dice micro-friendships. The introvert in me is having a hard time with the constant meeting of new people (booooo small talk!) and never having time to quite get to the more satisfying levels of depth and connection that characterize the friendships I have back home. That's why I'm still on Facebook and calling people more often than I thought I would be. The nomadic lifestyle creates a social life that measures much farther in breadth than depth, which I anticipate will be an ongoing challenge for me.
Walks on the beach: On Sunday, I walked along sidewalks at the top of the cliffs that line the Pacific along the Lima coastline, southbound, for about an hour, to get to a neighborhood called Barranco. I got some street food and then walked back northbound via the actual beach as the sun was setting, which was lovely. There are many romantic experiences to be had in life even if you are all by yourself, I must say.
At sunset, I detoured down a pier lined with tiny little stores with a beautiful restaurant at the end. I sipped on a cocktail and read Life of Pi. I swear I heard dolphins outside in the water, but sadly, it was too dark to confirm. When I left the restaurant, I spent $12 on chocolate at one of the tiny stores and decided it was time to get my budget figured out.
Brazil visa: I went to the Brazil embassy at 1:00pm on Monday, only to find out it closes at noon. Crap. Now I'll need to stay until Monday if it still takes five business days to process and I'm supposed to leave Lima on Saturday. Okay, fine, not the end of the world. I tried again on Tuesday around 10:30 and discovered that I was supposed to upload electronic scanned/PDF copies of several documents to the online visa application, so I rushed to the internet cafe and tried to re-apply online and upload documents via Dropbox, but then the clock ticked past noon and it wasn't going to happen yet again. So then I was like "I HATE LIMA" for about two hours, before I decided to just throw in the towel for any hope of getting my Brazil visa in Peru. I will try again in La Paz, and just stay there as long as it takes. And with that burden lifted, I grew to love Lima.
Spirit of Peru: Peru feels more pious, more religious than Colombia did. There seems to be a very spiritual energy here.... there's a VERY strong chance that I am projecting that into this place, because 1) that's what I've heard the people say about it, and 2) that's what I'm focusing on here for my own personal growth. But also, it might not just be me. It might be a real thing that I'm picking up on.
Walking: On Wednesday, I walked 11 miles with two destinations in mind: Parque de Aguas and Museo Larco. First, I walked to Parque de Aguas to check out the Circuito Magico de Aguas, which was lovely: a beautiful park with about 13 different fountains, all very dynamic, and most were accompanied by classical music. There were a couple fountains that people could play in, but most were just for viewing. I went during an overcast day and the mist from the fountains actually made me a bit chilly, so it definitely would have been more pleasant on a hot day. However, it turns out this park isn't really meant for daytime enjoyment anyhow -- the most magical time to visit the Magic Circuit of Water is after sunset, because they do crazy awesome light shows in the fountains. I didn't realize this until afterward and now there's no time to go back. Dammit. LOOK HOW COOL THIS WOULD HAVE BEEN!
Museo Larco: This was the second stop during my 11-mile trek on Wednesday. It is a gorgeous museum with artifacts from several different tribes that once inhabited the lands in Peru, before the Incas came to dominate the area (I think). There were lengthy descriptions next to all of the pieces, translated into eight different languages, so it was actually quite informative (although I don't recall anything that I learned right this second...) The Larco also makes the museum storage area open to the public, so you can walk around in the rooms where they keep all the "extra" pottery, textiles, and jewelry that for one reason or another, didn't make the cut to be put in a display case.
BONUS: I got to use my ISIC student card for a discount for the first time ($5 instead of $10). I need to remember to flash that baby at more front desk people the rest of the trip.
Casinos: Lima has a lot of casinos, which seems notable because that's different than the other cities I've been to so far. That is all.
The food: Lima has amazing food everywhere. The specialty seems to be seafood, and they've got lots of great ceviche and sushi options, but there are also several Chinese restaurants. When I was wandering around Barranco (the neighborhood to the south), I came across the restaurant below, which smelled delicious. Judging from the crowd standing around outside, the wait for a table seemed long, so I made plans to come back and try it out. However, I am now out of time and I just need to grieve the loss. Goodbye, El Muelle. *blows a kiss* Parting is such ceviche sorrow. (I think I'm not allowed to make puns for a while after that one...it may be too far a stretch to even qualify. Let's move on.)
I spent a lot of time my first couple days trying to track down restaurants that were recommended on other peoples' blogs and I think i'm done with that nonsense. People come to a city and they only have time to try a few places, and then those are the ones they recommend to other people; there's no reason to think those recommendations are going to be any more delicious than random ones I may come across myself. If I need a recommendation from someone in the future, I'm going straight to a local. They'll know where the real gems are.
Missing Colombia: I'm sure this will be an ongoing phenomenon, but I have noticed that the place that so recently was the unfamiliar, new territory (Colombia) is the place that now I remember and look back on as a place that feels homey to me. I feel like I got to know Colombia, its chain restaurants, its currency, its traffic noises, its climate, its music, etc. And I miss the people I knew there; amazing how people I knew for less than 7 days are now people I remember fondly as my closest friends from this trip.
Leo: Oh, Leo. This man shared my 3-bunk dorm room at the Lima hostel with me Sunday-Wednesday night, during which time it was just the two of us. (On Thursday, which turned out to be my last night there, a couple more people joined). He is from Ecuador originally, and he was in Lima for a week to explore a new city before visiting family in Quitos, but he lives in NYC now and works as an Uber driver.
For the first several nights, I was a little annoyed with Leo. He would try to start conversations with me when I had my headphones in, and if I was watching something on YouTube he'd ask me to turn the screen so he could see (which meant I couldn't multi-task and do other things on my computer at the same time), and every now and then I could feel him looking at me expectantly, like he was waiting for me to be off my computer so we could hang out. But he was harmless; it was easy to tell that he was a very sweet man who respected boundaries. When I had to be blunt with him and explain I couldn't hang out, or I preferred to be by myself, or no, I didn't want him to come with me to the Brazil embassy but thank you for offering, he would back off and say "no worries, I get it, that's fine, I understand."
He invited me to spend Thursday with him, proposing that we go to lunch together at a ceviche place he liked, and then see a movie. I told him I wanted to go to Barranco Thursday night, so he suggested we do lunch and then an early movie and that way we could do all the things together. (....yay!) But here's the thing... we had a great time. We didn't do the movie (I didn't have time for it after all), but we did ceviche together for lunch and then drinks in Barranco that night and it was a lovely evening.
Some notes about Thursday night with Leo:
- We walked at the same fast pace, which I appreciated (I am not getting regular exercise at all outside of walking, so I try to make it count as cardio)
- Leo didn't really hit on me, exactly, at all, and to his credit, he also didn't try to hold my hand when we crossed streets the first several times. But then he did try to once, so I explained why I wasn't into that (please refer to previous post re: my position on men I've just met wanting to hold my hand when we cross a street), and he got it, and it didn't make things awkward. I like when things can work out like that.
- At our first stop, a hipster bar inside of a mansion called Ayahuasca, we had a good talk about love and relationships over a couple over-priced but very yummy pisco-based cocktails.
- The second stop was a very cozy restaurant right across the street, Posada del Angel, where we shared a half-bottle of wine and listened to some live music -- one or two performers sharing a tiny stage with their guitars, singing mostly love songs.
- When we would cheers, we'd say "salud," of course, because that's the Spanish version of "cheers." But at some point Leo started saying "Salud, mi amor" and I was like, "Salud!" and he said, "say 'mi amor' " and I said, "that's kind of intimate, but all right, Leo." So the rest of the night it was always "salud, mi amor" with this man who I really didn't know at all. who kept bringing up the possibility of me visiting him in New York, and asking me to message him and send photos of my travels to let him know I'm doing okay, and... I don't know. I know I'm not going to see this man again on purpose. It would actually be pretty cool if we ran into each other randomly someday, but the time we spent together was enough, you know? What do you do in those situations, where someone wants to exchange info and get together sometime down the road, and you know it's just not going to happen? Do you do the info exchange anyway and then never respond to messages/make up excuses for why it can't happen, or do you lay out the realistic expectation from the get-go, which is to say, "this has been lovely and I'm so glad I met you, but this is goodbye." Seriously, is there a right, more ethical thing to do in that situation?
- On the walk back, Leo noticed a statue of the Virgin Mary, and wanted us to go pray to her. I haven't done that in a very long time, but something about Peru or traveling to places where old churches and religious iconography are more prevalent has made me want to connect a little more with my Catholic roots. So we went up to the statue, and said prayers to the Virgin Mary. It was awkward at first, but it really was a beautiful moment.
So that was Lima. If you ever find yourselves there, please go to the water park for the Circuito Magico de Aguas at nighttime, check out the hipster mansion bar Ayahuasca, and have a meal at El Muello and let me know exactly how much I missed out on.