Last Saturday I caught a flight from Tumbes in the north of Peru down to Lima. I was met at the airport by Sylvia (my friend through a friend) and we drove to Flying Dog B&B, a hostel in the centre of Miraflores which is one of the nicest parts of the city (this is where the cafés are!). The hostel was amazing! All the guys working there were really friendly, and the place just had a homely atmosphere (they even had two cats!).
After I had checked in to the hostel we went to have ceviche for lunch.. mmmm! Ceviche is the national dish of Perú, and it is basically raw fish in a spicy marinade served with onions and usually corn. I know.. it does sound disgusting, but it's really quite good (and that's coming from someone who never really liked seafood much).
The early evening I spent in the hostel having a few drinks with the guys who worked there, after which I headed over to Sylvia's place to go out party. After a drink at her house we headed to Barranco to go bar hopping (made very easy by the fact that they are all literally next to each other.. streets full of bars!) Crawled home in the early hours of the morning feeling very tired :)
The following day I spent mostly around Miraflores. Took in the local coffee culture and ran som errands and strolled around the parks during the day. In the evening we picked up some beers from the supermarket and chilled in the hostel with a few Irish and English guys who were staying in the same place. At 1am the beer was out and so we decided to hit the bars on la calle de las pizzas (pizza street, a street which lives up to its name.. there's nothing but italian restaurants on it!). This is when the evening turned mad. We managed to negotiate free drinks at two of the restaurants.. and so we had three free Pisco Sours (a drink made of the locally produced grape brandy Pisco) and a free beer each.. in addition to all what we paid for. We also made friends with a couple of guys walking around the restaurants playing guitar and singing.. a few Beatles songs were sung and we also got to borrow their guitars for a while. The evening ended at around 6.30am when we far from sober stumbled home to the hostel.
Monday was a quiet day which really didn't start before it was over.. woke up at 2.30pm and had breakfast at 5pm after having moved my stuff to the hotel booked for us by GAP (the organisers of the tour of Peru which I'd booked). The night was again spent in the Hostel with a few beers, and later we ended up on pizza street after an unsuccessful attempt at finding another nightspot on a monday night.
On Tuesday it was time to pack up and leave Lima for Pisco.. a three hour drive south of the capital. More about that later.