A while back I shared some photos of the local street art in Barranco. And when I say “some,” I really mean it: Barranco is a painted city. Whelp, I’ve collected another batch of graffiti / murals and done my best to find their stories. Again though, I’d love to learn more! If you can share…
Ivo has a real talent for date night, especially when it comes to dinner out. Trattoria Don Vito is on his list of “consider this wife impressed” romantic evenings. The restaurant is in Miraflores on Martin Dulanto, and its interior design reflects its history: The place was established in 1982. The food, service, and experience…
I still don’t exactly blend into Lima, Peru. I’m painfully white, my Spanish is broken, and I cross even the tamest city streets like a panicked deer. But despite all that, I’m finally falling into comfortable patterns of life. I know where things are (sort of), and I’m capable of giving just about as many…
There’s a lot of cuisine, Americanized and traditional, that I enormously miss: Mexican, Korean, Thai, Chinese, and (of course) Indian. But Peru’s cuisine is truly some of the best in the world, and maybe as a result, the chefs in Lima love putting their own fingerprints on other culture’s foods. When you’ve got the food…
For about an hour of grueling Lima traffic, Pulga the dog, my husband Ivo, and gringa me hunkered in a back seat and entrusted the friend driving the car with our lives. Pulga got carsick and puked. Ivo started advising me on how to stop Pulga from puking. I tried to sooth our sad, goobering…
What’s a restaurant where you can’t bring your dog? Just a regular restaurant, I guess. But a restaurant where you CAN bring your dog? That’s definitely better. Bao are, very roughly speaking, the Chinese version of pasties: While pasties have crust, bao have fluffy, airy, white bread that has been steamed, not baked. Each heavenly…
This April, Ivo and I celebrated our 5-year anniversary. We did a whirlwind tour of Cuba and stayed in Miami for a week afterwards. Then hurricanes followed on our heels. Soon I’ll post vacation blogs about Cuba, maybe cheesy photos of us being nostalgic for our home in Miami Beach. But the hurricane images in my…
I’m four episodes into Star Trek: Discovery, and I have thoughts. The first few minutes of Discovery are promising: Georgiou and Burnham have chemistry. Georgiou is quirky, clever, professional. She’s got the cheesy flair of a great Star Trek captain. And yeah, seeing a new kind of face adding diversity to the captain’s chair is…
I watched football once. Well, maybe four or five times, accidentally, since sometimes the TV was in front of the snack table. Basically, I don’t know much about football. But I do know a little about symbolism. ‘to kneel’ Oxford English Dictionary: [To] be in or assume a position in which the body is supported by…
Driving the hour to Mala is always worth all 60 minutes of our fluffy dog-child squirming on my lap. But back when you still needed a jacket to stand outside, Michael and Silvia and a slightly smaller Bastian invited us for something extra special. We were going to do a “pachamanca.” Pachamanca is what I’d roughly…
From about 9 am to 3 pm in the summer, literally across the street from our apartment, a local market magically appears every Sunday. Having the Feria Ecológica de Barranco next door is like being walking distance from a miniature Findlay Market (as a metaphor for my friends from Kentucky). The food is organic, fresh, often…
One morning when I was 23 years old, my mother did not wake up. I got the phone call several hours after the fact: It was an undetectable heart condition. It had no symptoms. She went to bed the night before, and a few hours before the sun rose, her heart stopped. Sudden loss amidst…
Boy Scouts will now be accepting transgender kids, right? Great. Atheists and agnostics are still prohibited. In terms of our “appeal” as a minority group, atheists almost always rank about where goblin sharks would rank on a list of cute animals: Dead last. We’re not even ugly-cute. Nonetheless, the number of atheists in the USA is growing:…
For one year in Florida, I taught community college. My career as an adjunct professor totaled six entry-level English classes, each with about 20 to 30 students. I adored it. I despised it. Both? Regardless, my online business got better and I moved abroad with my husband, so I had to give it up. And…
My case is particular: I’m passionate about US politics, but I live in Peru about half the year. Mailing anything to the USA entails a 15-min drive in hellish Lima traffic and a fee of at least a few dollars (not cents). Making phone calls to US offices generally requires entering 7 extra digits and…
La Colorada 