Back in Ayacucho

 

I'm in Ayacucho, having arrived yesterday for a two-evening colloquium on "Class, Gender, and Building of Peace in Peru".

I'm staying at the rather pleasant ViaVia Hotel, right the main square.

The hotel is located in Colonial  mansion that has been fixed up with funds from Belgium and is run by the ViaVia traveller's cafe and hotel chain  - they even have Belgian beers on sale in the restaurant.

Normally, I'd stay at the family home on Garcilazo de la Vega street, two block from here, but it's never that comfortable -despite being free- so I opted for the hotel and hot showers on demand.

Not much sooner than I had arrived than the power went out and remained out through lunchtime and on into the late evening.

That meant that I missed all of the Argentina-Holland soccer game in the World Cup except for the addiional time added on because they were tied at the end of egulation time.

The game went to penalty kicks, which I had to miss as otherwise I'd have been late to the colloquium. Fortunately, like sio many others, I could keep up with the progress at any shop doorway and window!

Lunch at the Sheraton

Today we had lunch at the Sheraton Hotel's reknown sancochado buffet.   Sancochado means "boiled" and refers to food cooked in a boiling liquid, and in Peru, sancochaado, as a noun, refers to a meal of boiled meats (most often beef and mutton) and vegetables (usually cabbage, carrot, celery, leek, and potato), served with the broth on the side.

Sancohado is often served on Mondays as a restorative tonic to the excesses of the weekend and as a way of getting enough substance in order to start the work week.

In Lima several restaurants compete for serving the best sancochado, and among  them the Sheraton Hotel regularly comes at the top.  The weekly sancochado lunch buffet served at its Las Palmas restaurant is famed among sancochado enthusiasts, and it is easy to see why.

The Sheraton's buffet offered 15 cuts of meat -including varied cuts of beef and pork, but also mutton, chicken, turkey, and sausages-, 5 soups or broths, a couple dozen vegetables, and 50 sauces to accompany them.  That is in addition to the several salads, many desserts and 50 varities of flavoured piscos on hand...

 

Personally, I love a well-done sancochado, so this lunch was a real treat, and it was made even better because I got to try tripulina as well.

Tripulina is a dish that was started from the practice among abattoir workers of taking the odd bits of offal that were not widely wanted by customers and distributors, and throwing them into a common cooking pot.  In time it developed into a dish of its own, whose name -"tripulina"- makes reference to its origins in the tripas, or intestines or "guts".  The Sheraton's tripulina, as tasty as it was, however, was limited to beef testicles.


Afterward, Liz and I walked over to the Lima Museum of Art, about two blocks down, at the intersection of Wilson and Paseo Colon.