Lima Day 4: No Octopus today

Sunday, December 13

Sundays are strange in Lima, food-wise. You either eat a Big Lunch and go Home, or you are on your own for the day. After Saturday, I wasn't worried about starving to death, so I decided to play it by ear.

In the morning, I walked over to Surquillo Mercado #1, where -- on the weekends -- they have a mini food festival.

I ordered two of my stand-bys from two of the same women: Rocoto Relleno (ha!) and a Causa con Pulpa de Congrejo y Camarones.

The Pepper is, well, a Stuffed Pepper. So I was happy. And I really like this Causa. It is filled with what we would call Crab Salad with a Shrimp or two thrown in for good measure.

Because Sunday is an 'Anything Can Happen Day,' what happened next was: Chicken Noodle Soup. Or as the call it here: Caldo de Gallina.

So the place is full of people eating Soup and enjoying life. I decided to join them, and I plopped myself down and ordered a Caldo de Gallina. The waiter disappears, and when he comes back he tells me that they are out of Chicken, but I can get the Soup, and the Noodles, and the Egg, and all the life enjoyment that I can manage without a piece of Chicken. I'm nothing of not a go with the flow guy, so I went with the flow, and enjoyed life.

Then I went home to nap for a while.

A couple of months ago, I signed up on a site called Couchsurfing. It's pretty much an exchange program, where you kind of pay it forward, or sideways, or something. You can search for and crash at people's homes all over the world, and the cool part is that you get to visit somewhere through the eyes of a local, as it were. Anyway, I had a guy stay at my place a little while back, and I met a girl from Colorado who had a one-day layover in Ft. Lauderdale.

So I was looking at the site, and a Peruvian woman was looking for a place in Ft. Lauderdale for a few nights in January. I wrote to her, told her that she could use my guest room, and by the way, I was in Lima RIGHT NOW if she wanted to talk. Log story short -- we made plans to meet for Dinner later that night.

I got to our meeting point first, and it was closed. So I went next door to Norkys (a chain of Diners) here and had some Fries while I waited. No, I didn't eat the whole thing.

So Cristy shows up, and she's with her friend Melissa and some German guy, who we will call German Guy. It's Sunday, so everywhere we try to go is closed. The girls ask me if I know anywhere (it was the German Guy's first day in Peru - he met Melissa via Couchsurfing as well), but all my Sunday joints were in the other end of town.

We finally settle for Hikari, which is a Chicken place, but they sell EVERYTHING, they tell us.

Hikari pretty much does sell everything, so we order a plate of Anticuchos and a Mixed Appetizer.

We split all of that pretty evenly.

For our Main Courses, German Guy and I split a Lomo Saltado (he's German, so mostly he drinks Beer, he explained), Cristy had a Grilled Chicken Breast and Melissa had a Sopa Criolla. The girls swapped plates halfway through their meals. They explained that they share everything with each other. When I did some further interviewing on that point, it turned out that it wasn't really *everything* so you can all get your heads out of the gutter.

Anyway, the food was OK. I wouldn't take a taxi halfway across Peru to eat there, and one of my favorite restaurants is right across the street, but if it was the only place on earth, it wouldn't be a terrible thing. There were a few adult beverages involved, and the whole thing came to 190 soles ($57) for too much food and drink for the four of us. It seemed like we each got much more than fourteen dollars' worth of stuff.

Here's a photo of the whole, happy table.