Saturday morning started with what has become a pretty typical event: a stroll to Barranco. This week we started early enough to have breakfast at Bisetti, a cool coffee shop in the heart of the neighborhood. I'll have to do a full run-down of coffee places at some point, but Bisetti is one of my favorites. It has a comfortable vibe, the coffee is outstanding, they roast their own beans, and the baked goods are far above average as well. We staked out a sofa and table near an old espresso machine:
and had quiche, a muffin, cappuccino, and french press for breakfast. Muffins are routinely pretty awful in Lima, but this one was great. The quiche was good (as expected), and the coffee is always reliably delicious here. It was a great start to the day.
The next stop after a brief stroll was the MATE museum. This museum focuses on the photography of Mario Testoni, a world-famous fashion and portrait photographer. His work has been featured in Vogue, GQ, Vanity Fair and many others. He has photographed many household names. Some of his most famous photos were those he took of Princess Diana shortly before her death. His photos of her were the last official portraits taken of her. The museum is full of his work and is very nicely put together. A particularly interesting gallery in the museum features Testoni's recent portraits of Andean traditional dress. His focus has always been fashion, and he made a major effort to photograph some of the highest traditional Peruvian fashion, with this work featured in this exhibit. It is not a huge museum, so the Little Lady had no trouble making it through. She especially enjoyed the photos of the traditional dress.
On Sunday we had lunch at Social Restaurant. It's just a few blocks from us and has one of the best brunches in Lima. For Father's Day they had a special brunch. There was a ceviche station for fresh seafood and fish ceviche, a sushi station with rolls, a crepe station, a grill station, and a dessert station. In addition there was a menu of main dishes. You could order as many as you wanted. It was great to have the benefit of a buffet where you can try lots of items but have those items prepared fresh and in small portions so that many things could be tried. All of the food was great, and it included unlimited pisco sours, juice, and gin and tonics on top of the great food. It was a very nice experience and a great way to celebrate Father's Day.
After coming back from brunch it was time to get ready to go to a show - Pinocchio. I saw an advertisement in the newspaper a couple weeks ago for this show. It was marketed as a theater experience for kids, so we thought we would take the Little Lady. The tickets were not too expensive, the show was in the Gran Teatro Nacional that I was hoping to check out at some point anyway, and the show was not too late in the night making it easy for us to attend. So we decided to make the plunge.
This show is an operatic production of Pinocchio originally done in Spain. It had a large cast, live orchestra, and included the national youth choir as part of the performance. We had great seats, just about 15 rows back toward the middle on the first floor. Leading up the show we found a copy of the Pinocchio book online and we read it to the Little Lady several times so she would know what was going on. She really enjoyed the show. It was close to two hours without an intermission, but there was constant action to hold her interest. Above you can see the best photo I was able to grab with my phone of the Little Lady with Pinocchio after the show. We'll be making a return to the Gran Teatro in about a week for the Retablo Sinfonica, which is a celebration of Peruvian culture focused on dance and music. I will report back on that once we see it.
What a great weekend! That brunch sounds amazing!
ReplyDelete