Went to lunch today with my sisters and my dad.   At his choosing we went to the Casa de España restaurant one block from San Felipe.   It was a favorite of our grandmothers, and I guess my dad was in the mood for some sangria and paella valenciana.

Then we spent a lazy afternoon napping, and with the ladies getting their nails done at one of the salons in San Felipe.   Later tonight we'll be heading out to Barranco and to the La Noche nightclub.

In Lima

Well, it's my third day in Lima and am having a good time so far.  But, of course, that was to be expected.

On my arrival, we headed straight to San Bartolo for an early dinner at Jose's restaurant, Bocana.  The drinks and food were deserving of the rave reviews they had been getting from the rest of the family.   They were actually scheduled to close after lunch on that day and shut down for the winter, but since they knew that a number of the family were coming, several of whom had not had the opportunity to try it, including myself straight from the airport, they kept the place open a few extra hours.

Yesterday we ate lunch at my aunt Betty's ... I'm gonna have to get her spaghetti sauce recipe from her ... and then I headed to the Centro, to Quilca street, to buy  used books, and I walked away with quite a load of stuff that's nigh to impossible to find in the US. 

In the evening I met my dad at Jose Carlos Mariategui Site Museum for a talk on the disagreements between Julio Antonio Mella, Victor Raul Haya de la Torre, and Mariategui in and around 1928.   It was a rather interesting talk but the Q&A session turned  into a shouting match at the end as a former congressman for APRA, the party founded by Haya de la Torre and currently in government, demanded the floor to refute to the refutation of an earlier longwinded dissertation delivered by him, which had brought the rest of the audience to its feet protesting that beside monopolizing the floor, the guy wasn't even posing a question but simply attacking the speaker.   All quite fun!

Countdown..

I'm just a few days away from heading to Lima for my cousin Mariana's wedding.

I'm told that the plan for when I get to Lima is to head straight from the airport to my cousin Jose's restaurant in San Bartolo, Bocana.     I've never been there and that will be on the last day before it shuts down for the winter, so getting a chance to try it makes me very happy.

Got my DNI!

This weekend Liz and I went to the Peruvian consulate in San Francisco to pick my DNI.  The DNI, Documento Nacional de Identidad, is the basic Peruvian ID card.  Having it will make many transactions easier and, in some instances -e.g. purchasing air travel within Peru- cheaper.

Normally, it takes about 3 months for the RENIEC, the government dependency in charge of these matters, to send a DNI to a consulate once the  request is made, but in this instance, they did it in about half the time.