Home Away from Home: On (Repeat) Visits to Peru

I married my wife this past Veterans Day down in Lima, Peru. It was my fifth time visiting her and her family since we met in 2019, with three of those visits in 2023 alone.

Even the first time I went down there in 2021, it felt like a home away from home. I'm not sure if I should chalk that up to how well my wife hyped me up to her friends and family or the fact I had met them over FaceTime before meeting them in person.

Regardless, I have always said if you get the opportunity to go to Peru, take it because you won't regret it.

Granted, I have mainly seen the capital of Lima, but I have visited the cities of Ayacucho and Cusco. And yes, I have been to Machu Picchu, and it really is as spectacular as the pictures.

Lima itself is a big city, and there is no shortage of places to visit. Up in Callao (technically its own city) is Real Filipe, the Royal Philip fortress, which now doubles as Peru's military museum.

Downtown Lima is where you can find even more historical and civic buildings like the congressional building, the presidential residence, and the Gran Teatro del Peru.

Near the Pacific coast are some of Lima's more upscale parts, including the districts of Barranco, Miraflores, and San Isidro. This is the part of town where a lot of shops (including Larcomar, a mall built into the cliffside) and some of the best restaurants are.

Did I mention Peruvian food is considered some of the best in the world?

In addition to ceviche, there are some awesome dishes like aji de gallina, which is shredded chicken in a yellow chili pepper sauce (which they call huancaina), more casual things like salchipapa (normally just fries and hotdog, but you can add more to it like cheese, bacon, and hamburger meat), and, my personal favorite, lomo saltado, which is stir-fried beef, onion, and tomato mixed with fries and served with rice (Peruvian food actually has a bit of Chinese influence, and places that serve this fusion are called chifa).

And yes, they do eat guinea pig (called cuy, pronounced "cooee"), but that's mainly up in the Andes in places like Ayacucho (a place I like to describe as a mountainous version of St. Augustine, Florida) and Cusco. Plus, if you were to eat it blindfolded, it would taste no different from chicken.

On top of that, the booze is nice, with pisco (a grape-based brandy) being the national spirit. Don't let the Chileans tell you they do it better. Pisco can be made into sours or as a chilcano, a cocktail made of pisco, ginger ale, or soda water, and a bit of lime juice. Sour, but good to sip.

The beer -- whether it is Callao's pride and joy Pilsen, which tastes kind of like Miller Lite, or Cusquena and its gold lager, wheat beer, dark, or red options -- won't leave you dry either.

But one of the other reasons I consider Lima my home away from home is the comfortably slower living of Peruvians. Breakfast is light and a bit later in the day, while lunch is the big meal.

In my experience, friends and family get together for big soccer matches like El Clasico between Peru's two biggest domestic teams, Alianza Lima and their rivals Universitario.

But I haven't even touched on how wild they can party. When people say they can party all night long, Peruvians take that as a challenge. There are plenty of nightclubs to hit up across Lima; one I personally visited is in Chorrillos (which is admittedly pretty rough-looking) called Kalpa.

In general, I have never felt unwelcome there despite some language problems, although rarely has it been anything Google Translate couldn't fix. I always learn more Spanish every time I visit (and it does help that a fair amount of my wife's friends and a couple of her relatives can speak English).

So if any of our readers have ever considered going, I again say: Do it. Just make sure the alien bodies you encounter aren't fake.