New Year’s, 2021 was a chaotic day for me. I didn’t plan to meet the love of my life the next day.
I was supposed to fly to Lima on New Year’s Eve but there was a transportation strike, and my flight was moved to the next day. Heck, I was originally going to go to Lima months earlier, but a wave of protests that was running its course throughout Peru convinced me to delay my plans.
I celebrated New Year’s on a hill in San Franciso, took an Uber to the airport, and arrived in Lima at 5 am the next day. Somehow, I managed to take the wrong suitcase from the airport which I didn’t realize until I checked into my Airbnb and opened my suitcase to see a Minion stuffed animal instead of the gear I had meticulously packed. I backtracked to the airport, went through customs again, and swapped suitcases. I feel back that I inadvertently delayed the other suitcase owner's day by a few hours.
Then, it was time to meet Mariela who I had met online and talked to on video for about three months. Looking back at our messages, it was unclear when the sparks began. The initial messages were very formal, something out of Spanish textbook. Then, she said “I know English too” and that began the fairly abrupt abandonment of my resolve to learn Spanish for everyday life (ie be able to talk about non-food topics).
Mariela and I had made plans to meet at 2 pm at El Mercado which I visited every time I was in Lima. They weren’t taking reservations at the time. I arrived a little early and they told me we could be seated in three hours. Mariela arrived and asked in Spanish and we were then told twenty minutes.
Mariela was much more beautiful in person so much so that I was now nervous. In all of the details including the way she pressed each piece of ceviche into the lime to maximize the flavor, I could instantly see that she liked to do things her own way.
We ordered ceviche carretillero, conchas a la parmesana, and arroz con mariscos which would continue to continue to be three of our favorite dishes which we would order over and over again. El Mercado was already my favorite restaurant, and it was now our favorite restaurant.
After lunch, we took a walk in no direction in particular. My memories of that walk are so vivid. There were so many little things to point out to each other like we were catching up on little observations that we had bottled up for a lifetime.
We ended up at the beach as the sunset was setting. We chuckled as parents encouraged their kids to chuck stones overhead into the ocean1. Amidst the stone-throwing, we shared our first kiss.
I wanted to show Mariela the little bits of Lima I knew. Our first dates included Callao, Cala, and Cafe Tostado. I quickly exhausted my limited list of places I knew at the time.
Soon we were spending lockdown together. Mariela would tell her friends and family how strange it was that I would spend a month in a neighborhood and then change to another neighborhood the following month.
In each place, we would quickly adopt a routine of ordering ceviche every day for lunch (each place would have a different list of restaurants in the delivery radius) and then taking a walk after work. In all of my earlier 2-3 day visits, I had never slowed down enough to appreciate how beautiful the sunsets were in Lima.
We quickly realized how similar our tastes were even though we grew up on different continents with different family food heritages. Her dad is from Callao and loved eating fish. Her mom grew up on a farm and was responsible for cooking beans, rice, stews, and vegetables for her siblings. I grew up eating Thai Chinese food in Southern Georgia. Yet we share strikingly similar thoughts and opinions about the food we share, even when they are unpopular opinions.
Mariela often tells me that she is the one who showed me Lima. She’s definitely the one who convinced me to call it home, but I like to think we learned Lima together. I love how the early moments of our relationship are intertwined with the geography of Lima. We can’t drive too far around Lima without passing a place that holds some significance for us.
We’ve I sometimes wonder if I should’ve gone earlier despite the political situation and had met Mariela a few months earlier2. Of course, if I knew what I know now, it would be a no-brainer. But in truth, we more than made up for lost time.
The first few months of the relationship, we shared every hour of the day together. In the last three years, we’ve shared many meals, sunsets, and ordinary moments made memorable over two continents (soon to be three).
We’re fortunate to have seen some of the world’s wonders together (Galapagos was a true one-in-a-lifetime trip). We’ve also gone to some of the world’s best restaurants together, but many of our most memorable moments exist in the space between. We still laugh and laugh about a tiny confusion that happened when ordering empanadas at a gas station. Sorry, you had to be there.
In the US, I’m more used to kids learning to skip stones from their parents. When I go to beaches in Peru, I usually see families throwing larger stones overhead into the ocean.
My imagination was running a bit wild based on the US news coverage that I was reading. Keep in mind back then that there was also a lot of turmoil in the US as well. Three years later, I’ve gotten used to the political backdrop in Peruvian life. On December 7, 2022, when the Peruvian president was suddenly ousted, I was the one telling Mariela that it would likely be business as usual in a couple of weeks.