Miraflores

Miraflores is the affluent section of Lima, framed on three sides by less wealthy neighborhoods crumbling under the salty sweep of the wind, and to the west the Pacific Ocean. Sometimes I have to remind myself that as I walk down Jose Pardo Avenue, one of the main drags of Miraflores, I'm walking down Peru's answer to Fifth Avenue. I pass a young, wealthy couple pushing a designer stroller with wheels more appropriate for the Inca Trail, with a baby inside making the flat-lipped, bubbly face of a born gurgler. To my left is the Brazilian Embassy, a forbidding affair of well-manicured but empty palm gardens behind an insurmountable fence, the building itself more a bomb shelter than anything else. To my left, the offices of Taca Airlines, of 'Alive' fame, seemingly trying to glitz the passerby out of any recollection of the past. People walk across intersections fast here, as there isn't much time. To cross busy streets without stoplights, one must simply plunge ahead and hope in the reflexes of the drivers coming at you.
All of the major airlines have their offices on Pardo. There is a grocery store that's alot like some of the high-end organic grocers in America, Vivanda, with inviting open spaces, fresh and clean produce, and a delicious selection of prepared foods - though the resmblance is only skin deep, with nothing organic available on the shelves. Here at any given time of day one can find what I would estimate to be twenty percent of the gringos in the city, avidly scanning the aisles for brands they recognize. I myself can be seen there at least once a day, trying to find things-lowfat.
Other than these embellishments, the avenue is not unlike many avenues throughout the rest of the sub-city, with apartment buildings, hair salons, restaurants, and inestimable numbers of travel agencies and copy stores. There are still armed guards with bullet-proof vests at the entrances to all the banks, hard mouths begging for toothpicks to break with practiced tension. Old men with battered bean cans still scrape popsickle sticks along them tunelessly, mumbling misfortunes, the rattle gaining effect with each coin tossed in. The air is just as dirty, smog suddenly enveloping the walker and making it truly difficult to breath. The difference is not in what is not here, so much as it is about what is here; the location of the primary facets of affluence make this part of town the wealthy part, draw the joggers and four-wheel-drive strollers and glamorous women in darkly tinted cars, but it doesn't edge out what the rest of Lima is like, the crumble and grit of the wider city of eight million souls. There is stark contrast on the streets of Miraflores, like a medieval morality tale playing itself out with accidental actors, observed piecemeal by people glancing out of planes for moments as they enter and leave the distant airport. The richness of the city is here, but it hasn't managed to overshadow the poverty of the city itself.