Our tour continues.
Next, we stepped outside the hotel and stood at the corner of Jirón de la Unión and Jirón Ocoña facing this building.
Jirón Ocoña is lined with casas de cambio or money exchanges. According to Berner, this particular building bears the moniker “El Bunker” because few people entered or exited unarmed. Remember that when the Fujimori government changed the currency from the inti to the nuevo sol people needed a million intis to purchase a single sol. I suspect there was massive corruption at the time.
PC at last.
The sun began to set as we started our walk north along the pedestrian section of Jirón de la Unión. It was Saturday night so the street was teeming with people. We’d walked about two long blocks when to my left I saw this.
I wrote in a previous post about being eager to try authentic Peruvian pollo a la brasa or, as we call it at home, PC (for Peruvian Chicken). Within a two mile radius of my house I can choose from more than half a dozen PC restaurants. Each applies a somewhat different spice rub before spearing the chicken on a rotisserie above a wood fired oven. (2023 Update: The Covid-19 pandemic took a significant toll on these local neighborhood eateries including my personal favorite El Pollo Kiki Riki. The count is now down to three.) This is Norky’s – my first point of comparison.
Although it was something of an in between time (too late for lunch, too early for dinner), I convinced Berner and Jan to stop in for a taste. Presuming we’d eat a full meal in a few hours, Berner ordered only a quarter chicken that the three of us shared. Here are the main differences I noted:
- The chicken at Norky’s relied much more on cumin as the principal spice in its rub compared to most local spots in Maryland.
- Unlike our local restaurants, the choices of side orders are limited and the combination platters are generally preset. The basic platter at Norky’s was a quarter chicken, papas (French fries), and a salad with ranch dressing.
- Alternative platters included Brasa a la Pobre (which added a fried egg and a fried banana to the basic dish); Chaufa Brasa (chicken with Peruvian style fried rice); and Chorichaufa (adds chorizo to the fried rice). No yucca or frijoles (common sides in Maryland) in sight!
- The sauces. In the States, two sauce styles usually accompany the chicken – a somewhat spicy green sauce that seems largely jalapeño pepper and vinegar dependent and a milder mayonnaise dominant yellow sauce. Here, the green sauce was the milder sauce and was, in fact, a tasty chimichurri. Norky’s yellow sauce was a salsa aji or yellow pepper sauce. It had more heat than most green sauces do at home.
By the time we finished the chicken, it was dark but the street was no less lively and as we walked along Berner pointed out some of the notable older buildings and related a few stories about old Lima. We then reached the main square – Plaza de Armas.
(Sadly, I had the wrong setting on my camera and most of the nocturnal photos are incorrectly exposed or suffer from my shaky hands. The photo above looking northeast is one of the few remotely clear shots.)
Dominated by the Cathedral of Lima and the Archbishop’s Palace, religion claims the east side of the square. The national government with the Presidential Palace and the Presidency of the Council of Ministers holds sway over the north side with the municipal government palace being the main structure on the plaza’s west side.
We walked beyond the square to the Rímac River whence we had an unobstructed view of the Cerro San Cristóbal (Lima’s highest point) and its illuminated cross
before Berner hailed a taxi for our return to Miraflores. We took a short walk and sat outside for a late supper at El Parquetito across from Kennedy Park (which I’ll visit when I return to Lima a few days hence).
A restless night.
When we arrived at the hotel, we said our tentative goodbyes because the tour officially ended the next day. Jan and I had both extended the basic tour so Sunday morning Jan was flying back west for her Amazon adventure, my planned itinerary would take me south to Paracas, and Berner would return to his home in Cusco.
Berner had assured me that the necessary travel documents (my bus tickets, transfers and hotel information) would be waiting for me when we first arrived at the hotel in Miraflores. They weren’t. Nor were they in situ when we returned from supper sometime after 21:00. Since I’d been told that my bus left at 07:30 Sunday and I thought the local travel agency would be closed, I asked Berner if I should consider canceling the extension and arranging either an extended stay in Lima or an early flight back to the U S.
He assured me that all would be well and the situation would be handled overnight. Despite that, I remained a bit anxious and slept even more fitfully than I normally do.
With bags in tow, I reached the lobby at 06:00 Sunday still unsure where I’d spend the next 72 hours.