An American in Lima

Screw the locals, screw the poor, screw the backpackers, screw anyone who wants to eat healthy Peruvian food at decent prices.

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A tension has been building up all week in our house as Father’s Day approaches. This was a low-key holiday for us back in the States — El Hijo would make El Fotografo a card at the last minute, or I’d haul him off to the mall to buy an electric razor — but since moving [...]

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photo c. Jorge Vera 2009 Alejandro is from Santiago de Cusco, a province near the former Inca capital. He led a comparsa of 22 members on the pilgrimage last week. He was intelligent and well spoken, and he patiently explained the signficance of each part of his Capac Qolla outfit to me. I was intrigued [...]

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“I can attest it works,” Taste of Peru co-owner Julie Izquierdo says of the restaurant’s Sopa de Viagra. (Chris Sweda/Sun-Times) Yesterday’s post on the medicinal powers of chilcano de pescado led to my discovering a Peruvian restaurant in Chicago that’s serving up a traditional fish soup as a wonder aphrodesiac. Taste of Peru in Rogers Park is touting its [...]

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I need my Jewish chicken-noodle soup in the wintertime. I grew up on the U.S. East Coast, where delis and diners and Jewish moms cook up barrels of this fragrant, healing soup all year long. Then I moved to Miami where at gourmet delis like Epicure, you can buy big jars of delicious matzoh-ball soup [...]

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We camped out for three nights (June 6-9) in the valley below receding Qolqepunku Glacier. That dark mountain on the right used to be covered with snow and ice. Once upon a twentieth century… I look at this photo, and what strikes me is how pleasant and cozy the scene appears. Warm sunlight, plenty of space between [...]

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Doing the Yawar Mayu dance with a dancer from Cusco El Fotografo and I were making friend with our camping neighbors — a comparsa from Cusco — at the Qoyllur Rit’i pilgrimage last weekend, when suddenly one of the young dancers snatched me by the arm. “Come on, dance,” she said. No, I said, several times [...]

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Back in Lima today after four days and three nights at Qoyllur Rit’i. We got great material (interviews, photos, video), and all of us survived, but it was an ordeal. photo c. Jorge Vera 2006 Bitterly cold temperatures (-10 degrees Celcius), sleepless nights accompanied by constant drumming, dynamite being set off helter-skelter. Having to re-set up camp ourselves in [...]

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It is quarter of nine in the morning, and we’re waiting for the van to pick us up at Hostal Buena Vista, in Cusco, to take us to Mawayni. That’s where pilgrims begin the eight-kilometer climb to the shrine of Qoyllur Rit’i. The hostal is owned by El Fotografo’s cousin Jorge, who’s got a nice [...]

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A front-page article in Sunday’s El Comercio exposed the criminal indifference of local and state governments to the deaths of children in the Andes. Some Peruvians are outraged at the country’s indifference to the preventable deaths of children in the Andes, as this widely circulated cartoon shows. Others shrug their shoulders and say, “That’s Peru.” This year alone, [...]

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