The food

Before the trip I seemed to be most concerned with Peruvian cuisine! I had heard rumors of guinea pig and random hairs! I must say that I feel like God took good care of me in the food department. However, there was guinea pig WITH hair!

We started every morning with breakfast at the hotel. We had bread with strawberry jelly (my favorite) and scrambled eggs. There was also the most amazing fresh-squeezed orange juice every morning. I don't even like orange juice and I could have had that to drink all day long! One morning, Yolanda (the hotel owner) played a little switcheroo and gave us Papaya juice...eck! Apparently she was offended that nobody was drinking it so I did my best to chug it down. I'll be good if I never drink that again. Rumor has it that our scrambled eggs were actually quail eggs one morning too. Luckily, I didn't find that out until much later.

For lunch and dinner we ate at local restaurants. At lunch we started with soup (complete with random chicken parts)...I usually passed! The main meal consisted of white rice and some kind of chicken or beef. I didn't take pictures of everything we ate but occasionally I remembered.

We ate this twice...Lomo Saltado (basically steak fajitas with french fries mixed in)...


Oddly enough there was a bit of Chinese influence. I don't remember what's it called, but it's just chicken and noodles...


This was just some kind of grilled chicken with rice and potatoes...


This was my favorite Chavin meal, it's called Aji de Gallina (shredded chicken with white rice and some kind of sauce)...


On our last night in Chavin we made like the Peruvians and celebrated with Cuy (guinea pig)! This picture was taken a few days before on our first trip to the same restaurant, it's Trevor and I with the real-live guineas...right in the restaurant...



They normally eat this on special occasions and I think it's almost always fried. We ordered one and anyone who wanted to try it was going to take a bite. Going into the meal I had absolutely NO intention of even trying it. Then I decided it would be handy if I ever got the old "What's the strangest thing you've ever eaten" question someday. I had a really hard time even wanting to pick it up for a picture...


You can see that someone was having to steady my arm because I had just discovered that one of it's intact feet still had fur on it...


Finally, they passed me a bite on a fork and it really did look like chicken! Here's Haley and I taking the bite together...


Here's my reaction to coming to the realization that I just stuck guinea pig in my mouth...


When we arrived back in Lima at 9:00 pm we immediately went to Chilis....


And all was right again! Other Lima meals included Fridays, McDonalds, Pizza Hut, and Chili's again!