Back on My Bulls**t: Lima, Peru
A mini assessment of what it's like living in my hometown again
Back on My Bullshit are intermittent, totally idiosyncratic travelogues. Don’t worry, I give standard recommendations below but this isn’t your mom’s Travel & Leisure city guide.
The Sunday edition of the times chose Lima, Peru’s capital, for its weekly “36 Hours” column. I roll my eyes about as much as anyone who is either too far left or too far right for the United States (lol), but I still get a little thrill whenever I see solid feature on my hometown.
While the Peruvian tourism boom has been going on for at least two decades, with mixed results regarding how much it positively affects the population, I still remember a time when Lima was avoided, overlooked, disparaged. And I LIVED through a time when I could begrudgingly understand why. When I was a teen, the city felt provincial despite its ginormous population (about 8 million back then; we’re at 10 million now). A long period of internal violence resulted in a total lack of third-spaces and widespread fear made an already conservative society even more risk-averse. We were the major Latin American city musicians skipped, tourists skipped, massive international brands skipped and while some of that feels like a dream NOW, in our over-touristed world, it wasn’t like that vacuum was being filled by a bunch of homegrown talent. We were too poor, too traumatized and too stuck in a lingering hierarchical mindset.
How did this feel to me as a teen, who had the additional burden of being in an extremely religious school when I myself was not religious? Lima was boring lol. Parties felt less like a moment to let loose and more like a test on how demure and ladylike you could be while appealing to the male gaze while not claiming too much space while being just fun enough but definitely not enough to ruffle any feathers. Clubs and bars had unspoken but very obvious racist and classist standards that barred most Peruvians from going in or feeling welcomed, and it required knowing someone who knew someone. A struggling artistic scene did what it could to survive but this was a society that insisted everyone study and dedicate their lives to “Administración de empresas”, the only degree that assured a job, any job. Food was always great but it took a several years of a semblance of political and economic stability for it to blow up the way it did.
Suffice to say that I have a lot of baggage regarding Lima. I also understood, as an adult, that it was a traumatized city. I also understood, with every visit I made during my 20 plus years living abroad, that all cities change, all societies change and Lima was no exception. But I was still a little nervous to pack up my life and move back to a place I had never enjoyed living in before.
A massive preamble to say this: I’m pleasantly surprised by how much I’ve enjoyed living in Lima during June, July and part of August. Now that I’m in the last week of a mini US tour, I’ve had time to articulate why.