Thursday 26/04
Vlog by Isabelle: See below.
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By me:
Normal (city / Airbnb) morning routine: breakfast with lots of fruit and then 2 sessions of homeschooling.
Around 1:30pm, we take an Uber to go and eat at ‘La Choza Nautica’, a popular cevicheria. We eat good ceviche and we also ordered ‘macha parmesana’ (which we tried with Marielle in Santiago), which the kids surprisingly like.
We walk to the Museo de Arte de Lima (MATE) where there’s an exhibition of Miro. The children don’t like Miro’s paintings too much but there’s a workshop where they can play a game (with dice) that makes them draw Miro-like paintings, which they enjoy. Meanwhile Isabelle and I visit the permanent exhibition of the museum.
We then go, on foot, to ‘Polvos Azules’ a kind of commercial center (in fact a multilevel, popular market) where we can find an impressive assortment of cheap goods, all with fake brands of course. Kids buys sunglasses, caps and earphones (Jules). Girls love this kind of big market; they wanted to go to such a market since the one of Ulaanbaatar, which they enjoyed a lot.
We then walk to the ‘Parque de la Reserva’, where there’s the ‘Circuito Mágico del Agua’, which is a series of illuminated fountains. A dozen different fountains – all wonderfully illuminated – are capped, at the end, by a laser light show at the 120-m long ‘Fantasy Fountain’. We attend the first daily show of the evening, at 7:15pm. It’s nice. The park contains 13 different fountains. One is a kind of tunnel in which we can enter (‘Fuente Tunel de las Sorpresas’). Another one is a kind of labyrinth with intermittent vertical jets (‘Fuente de los Niños’). Kids remove their shoes and go inside. Unfortunately, Jules falls and hurts himself.
We take a Uber to go and eat a good wooden-fired Neapolitan pizza at Spizza; good pizzas.
We take a Uber to come back home. Kids are tired.
Isabelle shows me the programme for the US that she has been preparing since we arrived in Lima. Very nice but quite extensive (very ambitious).
We go and sleep early tonight (10:30pm).
Friday 27/04
By Ludivine:
Today was a chillax (chill+relax) day! In the morning, Jules and Florence watched a movie and I downloaded some songs and we all did our own thing while the parents worked. Then before lunch, we went to drop off our luggage that we weren’t going to need for the next five weeks at someone’s house (I think mom’s friend or something) and then we headed out for lunch. For lunch we went to a salad bar. Our food took time to come but it was really good! Plus the place we ate was half restaurant (healthy) and half shop (also only healthy things). So we ordered our food at the restaurant then bought drinks, kombucha, coconut water, and water, at the shop. After lunch we ate some ice cream and when we finished it was already 4pm. We got home and chilled out a bit more and I made some healthy ice cream (strawberry, banana, and milk) then we ate some pasta and went to bed early since we had to wake up at 5am next morning.
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By me:
No alarm clock today. It’s a relax day. No homeschooling for the kids today and no visit. Since the next 10 days will be tough, I schedule a day off for today. In fact, tomorrow, we leave for an itinerant 5-week trip, before coming back in Lima for the last week in Peru.
In the morning, we organize a bit our luggage since we want to leave some bags and suitcases at Giselda’s place. It’s great that she accepts to keep some of our bags!
We leave with the 2 black suitcases and the orange bag around 1:30pm, by Uber. Giselda lives in San Isidro. As per her recommendations, we go and eat nearby, at ‘freshii’, a very nice place where they serve (among other healthy things) nice bowls, which you tailor make, as usual. Each of us fills in the sheet with what we want (base / protein / toppings / sauce). We also take nice drinks, including a kambucha.
Jules, Florence and I still find a little space for an ice cream from the ‘Blu’ booth beside.
We then go back to the apartment, still with Uber, which proves to be a great (and quite cheap) solution in Lima (except the fact that the drivers cancel more often than in other cities).
In the apartment, the kids relax while Isabelle and I work on our laptops, as usual when we are at home…
Isabelle manages to book “resident” (i.e. overnight) summer camps for the kids in the US, near Chicago. Aoifinn, a friend of mine from Insead, greatly helped us in this unknown “field” for us. Thanks a lot! The kids are super excited.
I continue to prepare the trip in Peru. I eventually manage to finalize a nice (but expensive) programme with Amazonas Explorer. I’m struggling a bit with the booking of the flights from Cuzco to Puerto Maldonado though… (yes, we also go for a few days in the Amazonian forest!). I still have a lot of hotels to book since I excluded them from the scope of the agency. But I have now a pretty good idea of our Peru trip (see picture below).
We eat pasta at the apartment.
Tomorrow we leave Lima. I’m a bit worried since the weather forecast is quite poor for the Andes (they even forecast snow in Cuzco next week…).
