Peru - Day 7 (Central Lima, shopping district)

Today we went SHOPPING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'm not a big shopper, but Lima definately deserves the capitals and the exclamation marks associated with that word. David and I have gone without new clothes for quite awhile for this trip - and now we can see that it is well worth it. Today David bought 2 brand name T-shirts, a dress shirt, and a really nice sweatshirt, for about $30 CDN dollars. I bought a beautiful skirt that in Canada would be about $50.. here for only $7. I also bought my Hopie's flower girl dress for our wedding for a huge sum of 70 soles.... which is about $25 Cdn dollars.

The amount of people in the shopping district is incredible... it reminds me of what i've seen of Tokyo on television. You are constantly swarmed with people jibbering on in Spanish so quickly trying to sell you things.. I have no idea why they all assume we speak Spanish well enough to understand their slick fast speaking sales! They must think we're Europeans who've spent time in Spain perhaps. Each store usually has a person standing outside the store.. they're duty is two pronged as I see it - to try and convince people to come inside, and to act as extra security in case of shoplifters. Things are tight here... you need to show a receipt to get into the bathrooms at a food court.. and Bembos doesn't have free refills! Bembos is the Peruvian fast food chain like Mcdonalds, and Dave and I shared a Huacamba I think it was called today. Burger, fries, and Inca Cola. Don't ask what the burger had on top... I think Mama Chavez said it was salchipapa but it didn't seem like hotdog to me.. it seemed like scrambled egg?! and little crunchy chips. It was good! We also had cerviche for the first time today... yummy yummy!!! Fish and seafood marinated and raw.. but cooked through marination with lime juice. The juice was so yummy Claudia sucked it up with a straw!!

Our snack was that huge corn on the cob.. you can't really tell in the picture but the corn kernels must be almost 3 times the size of kernels here... and they serve it to you in a little bag with chile in it, a bit of green hot sauce that you smear over the cob as you eat it. A perfect street snack!

There was also some eggs for sale in the street.. little spotted eggs... pigeon eggs? Not sure how they would be ate when sold!

There were so many stores, and the buildings all had multiple levels with stores on each level (or the same store on each level) or underground twists and turns of 100 little stores in a basement, each store like a little stall with hundreds of clothes piled around the merchants. There were so many mannequins everywhere... and most were really really freaky looking!