A Blending of Worlds
Barranco, Lima, Peru
At the end of my street is the best restaurant in the world. Central in Barranco was voted the best restaurant in the world by more than 1,000 international culinary chefs. They serve a 12-course menu. See Chef’s Table, Season 3, Episode 6 on Netflix.
If I were so inclined, I could go enjoy the meal of a lifetime for about what I pay for my beautiful apartment less than half a block away for an entire month. People travel from all over the world to Peru to experience this restaurant. Michelin chefs line up on the street outside. I am surrounded by such places in Barranco. On any given morning I can walk from my house to enjoy a cappuccino and a croissant at Alanya Repostería.
In 2022, Alanya was voted the best bakery in Lima, Peru. One Saturday morning while visiting there we were seated at the table next to the former wife of Mario Vargas Llosa, one of Peru’s most celebrated authors. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010. At another table was a well-known actor in Peru. A cappuccino will run you $2.64.
When night falls I see another side of life in Peru. Last night I was awakened for a second night in a row to the sound of rustling outside my window. It grew louder as the sound of plastic was being crushed over and over again. I went downstairs and peered behind the iron bars of my window to see packs of people moving through the street tearing open garbage bags, digging for any salvageable treasures worth confiscating. The glow of cigarettes and smoke filled the air.
Just south of where I live in Lima is a completely different world, I am told. One where millions of people live in tiny shacks and shanty towns. Perhaps they travel north late into the night to rummage through the trash of those living at the next level up the food chain.
I have experienced this paradox, this merging of worlds, in almost every country where I have lived. The haves and the have-nots being forced together. In my hometown of Austin, I lived in one of the most desirable neighborhoods in the city. Homeless people approached the BMW’s and Teslas as they left the neighborhood for work every morning.
In Japan, homeless people are free to live in the park and have a relatively peaceful existence. In Costa Rica, the influx of Americans who have retired there have driven the locals further into poverty as the prices have escalated. I lived for six months on a coffee covered mountain in Panama among only my indigenous neighbors who woke me every morning with their singing while picking coffee.
Peru seems to be another country with the same issues, yet only more extreme and directly in my experience every day and every moment. Yesterday, while eating lunch, a young boy wandered in from the street to our table and asked for money in exchange for a piece of candy.
It is the first and most central teaching of Buddhism, the awareness that there is suffering all around us.
So then the question becomes not where one will travel the far reaches of the world to try to escape suffering but how one will live fully in a world full of great suffering and offer a small ray of light wherever one finds themselves in this world.
In 2019 travelled to Baekyangsa Temple in South Korea to meet Kwan Jeong, who was also featured on Chef’s Table. I spent three days at her temple in the mountains of Korea learning about the connection between meditation, food and sharing that with people. Simply being in her presence changed me as a person. I received the gift of a beaded bracelet from her on my birthday.
Please change your life by watching her on Netflix’s Chef’s Table, Season 3.
It will be an hour well spent.
Field Notes
“The moment of awakening is marked by an outburst of laughter. But this is not the laughter of someone who suddenly acquires a great fortune; neither is it the laughter of one who has won a victory. It is, rather, the laughter of one who, after having painfully searched for something for a long time, finds it one morning in the pocket of his coat.”
-Thich Nhat Hanh, Zen Keys
Travelogues
Enjoy five years of past articles from the Zen and Ink Journals journey in the archives.
Published Travel Articles
Enjoy published articles from my last five years of travel.
Subscribe. Donate. Share the Journey.
Zen and Ink Journals represents hundreds of hours of writing over the past decade, sometimes from a train in remote China or a coffee shop in Kyoto, a hammock in Costa Rica or a simple cabin on a mountaintop in Boquete, Panama or Ciudad Colón.
On these pages, I share my observations of kindness and beauty from my adventures in the world and invite you to listen quietly for the call within you to explore the places that beckon your soul.
If you would like to become a regular subscriber, please consider foregoing the cost of one cup of coffee and a pastry each month ($8) and becoming a monthly subscriber.
If you would like to stop receiving emails from Zen and Ink Journals simply click the unsubscribe button at the bottom of this email.