Lima is quite the interesting city both architecturally and culturally. In our week in Lima, we mostly hung out where we were staying in the posher area known as Miraflores, as well as its artistic cousin area of Barranco. Miraflores had your typical big grocery stores, a myriad of fast food joints including a Mc Donalds and KFC, as well as many of the Embassies, upper end housing with lush gardens, and small cute chocolate shops, organic markets, and yoga studios. Barranco was more an evening / night scene area with art galleries, cutting edge bars and clubs, and colourful restaurants - reminding me of the town of Cabo San Lucas in Mexico. What I love about the housing is how it is more to human scale than we are used to seeing in Canada. There are colourful walls, balconies, and cactus plants everywhere. The fences are wrought iron but also painted in various colours, and things are very clean but energetic looking. Because the area of Miraflores also houses many of the government buildings of Lima you have these human scale houses kitty corner to big sky-rise buildings of towering glass. You also see security officials with batons and at times guns patrolling the streets and buildings giving the city a surreal sense of security. For how safe and relaxed these areas seem the security and stories that float around whisper otherwise. The most beautiful part of Lima, at least for myself, is its endless boardwalk that skirts the city and the ocean. It is green, and houses parkland, and sculptures, docks, and water restaurants and of course a passageway that runs through. We went and walked a part of it at night one day. My friends had been talking about taking lanterns to light with us - and I was wondering what these were. Interestingly when we arrived to a parkland area of the boardwalk we stopped, and were each given one of these kite lanterns. One by one we lit them and watched them blow away into the sky like rockets - there we watched them sail over the city until they faded in the distant night sky.
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AuthorHello! My name is Tahira Karim. I was born and raised on the Canadian prairies have been leaving and returning ever since. I absolutely love to travel. I am an observer of life and culture, and I have a passion for history and food. I am a visual artist who specializes in painting and drawing. And this blog is a jumble of my writing and thoughts on travel, culture, and food, with a bunch of personal stories thrown into the mix. Enjoy! Archives
June 2017
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