A Clean, Well-lighted Place

Tony, my host in Lima, was on vacation when I got here, so we spent the first few days running around taking care of errands, seeing parts of the city. This week he had to go back to work at the Canal de Congreso and I needed to start writing. His apartment, with its stark, minimalist decor, just isn't a place where you'd want to spend the day by yourself.

Lima is incredibly loud. The traffic is monstrous. Tony's apartment is nice, by American standards, yet at all hours of day, you hear every single sound created by the lives of his neighbors: the whining dogs, the screaming children, the clamorous chores of the cleaning ladies, the droning radio that nobody is listening to, left on routinely, ceremonially, playing an inexhaustible fiesta with a Catholic sense of passionless duty. Contending with all this, the engines from the street below howl with enough ferocity to permeate our large, street-facing window on the 4th floor. I don't know how I'd be sleeping without earplugs. I don't even know where I'd be able to find earplugs.

If you're looking for a space of certified ambience, good luck. The concept of a "coffee shop" is still a novelty in Peru. For one thing, the people don't drink much coffee. They point out, and correctly so, that it's bad for the stomach. So in a marvelous display of common sense, they simply don't drink it. Instead, they are connoisseurs of "jugo," which translates to juice, I know, but if you order it in a restaurant, you're going to get a smoothie. Everybody's got a blender. The city's full of Juguerías where you can get any kind of smoothie: banana, papaya, strawberry, fruits you've never heard of. Tony served it for breakfast the first week I was there. Coffee remains a desert item, and even then, its only served in espresso form.

The second reason for the lack of coffee shops, and a less surprising one, is the rarity of wireless internet. In its place are "web cafes," hubs of old computers where you can get online for 50 centimos (less that 25 cents) an hour. This is great for checking your email, but the computers are slow and not ideal for doing work. On my 5th or 6th day here, I resigned myself to go to the one Starbucks in Lima, which is in Miraflores of course. On my way, I came across Cafe Verde. It's overpriced and they only serve espresso drinks, but other than that, Cafe Verde gets everything right; the atmosphere, the music (first they played an Andrew Bird album, then Iron & Wine), and the WiFi.