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Confessions of a Redhead in the Callejón: What I Learned at the Bullfights
November 29’s corrida marked the penultimate bullfight of the Señor de los Milagros festival, held in Lima’s historic Plaza de Acho bullring. The last day to see bullfighting in Peru’s capital is December 6, next Sunday. (Ticket information here.) My husband, El Fotografo, and I haven’t gone to any of the corridas this year, and we don’t plan to. EF is grossed out by bullfighting, even though he admits the sport makes for great picture-taking, especially when you have permission to stand inside the callejón, as we did last November. (The callejón is the low-walled alley surrounding the bullring where the toreros enter and exit the sand circle or ruedo. Occasionally a bull will leap or knock over the wooden wall, injuring…
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Writing on Bullfighting for HuffPo
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A Puppy Named Arena
Last month a Weimaraner named La Bruja gave birth to six puppies including Arena (“sand”), above. La Bruja belongs to one of El Fotógrafo’s cousins who lives in Jesus María. We had heard that La Bruja was embarazada but we weren’t keeping track of the due date or even thinking ‘puppies on the way.’ This past Sunday we went to a family almuerzo, and one of the kids brought this little velvet-furred creature in a cardboard box. I was kind of floored. The puppy has a wrinkled old-man face and a fat panza and a tail like that of a chubby rat. Who knew Weimaraner puppies were so tragically cute?
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Argentinean Doctor on Brink of Death after Eating Pickled Vizcacha
Frank Zappa once warned: Don’t eat the yellow snow. The same might be said about the vizcacha, a reclusive member of the South American bunny family that some food experts have recommended as a economical protein source. (See my Feb. ’09 post.) Seems that the experts didn’t realize that improperly prepared vizcacha is an ideal breeding ground for botulism, as one victim in Argentina recently found out. Dr. Francisco Diez, a 45-year-old orthopedic surgeon, was rushed to a hospital in San Rafael in the Cuyo region of Argentina, on October 25, after contracting a local form of botulism, reported Diario Los Andes and other South American news sources. Diez became violently ill after eating vizcacha en escabeche, a traditional Argentinean dish of rodent cooked in oil, onions…
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Pizza at El Italiano: Two Thumbs Up
It’s been more than a year since I had pizza at El Italiano, a classic pizzeria/trattoria in Lima’s rough-and-tumble La Victoria neighborhood. In that time I had forgotten that El Italiano makes better pizza than almost any other place in Lima, a city that should have lots of excellent pizza joints but for some reason doesn’t. What might have induced my temporary amnesia is that I always seem to crave El Italiano when it’s closed. Several times El Fotografo and I have driven to El Italiano on a Monday night, only to arrive at a darkened restaurant. It took three abortive outings for the restaurant’s schedule (open Tuesdays-Sundays) to sink into my…
