The Gwinners: Back to Callao

Sunday is a good day in Lima.
It's quiet.
There's very little traffic.
Yet stores and restaurants are open. So the city is both alive and more peaceful than usual.
The other thing we've discovered about Sundays in Lima is that if you venture out to different parts of town, you're very likely to stumble into some festival or cultural distraction of one type or another.
Today was no exception.
It started off slowly. We'd celebrated Britt's birthday last night with a few friends, plenty of food and drink, and a late night.
Plus, the day was promising to be very gray.
But it seemed like a good day to visit to Callao, anyway. (See earlier post about Callao for more info.)
Only Valerie had been there before. She wanted to show the guys the old fortress (built in the 1730s or so to protect Lima from pirates) and to explore the old fisherman's neighborhood, which has recently been renovated.
Shortly after we arrived at the Felipe Real Fortress, the sun came out turning the day more bright and gay.
We managed to short-circuit the standard tour (with guide), because one of the guides recognized Valerie from her last visit. Instead, we poked around the most interesting part of the fortress, which is called the King's Tower, and is essentially a fort-within-the fort. It comes complete with its own drawbridge, cannons, tower, and dungeon.
After this visit, we walked toward La Punta, which is the point of Callao that juts into to ocean. On one side is the large commercial port and smaller leisure port. On the other side of the point is the ocean, with a nice "malecon" boardwalk and a nature preserve full of birds of various types (boobies, cormorants, pelicans, egrets, gulls, and such).
The neighborhood of La Punta has old mansions from the early 20th century. It also has lots of smaller houses, many of which were built to house fishermen. They are brightly painted in all sorts of colors. They say that this is due to the fact that the fishermen used leftover paint from their boats, which explains the bright colors and use of multiple colors on one house.
Since the sun was out, these were particularly jolly.
As we were exploring these, we stumbled across a central square, where a big stage had been set up, along with food stands and tables. There was live music. The singers were, let's be honest, mediocre. But the mood was jolly, and the food stands offered all sorts of wonderful choices - roasted chicken, ceviche, and other classic Peruvian dishes, such as lomo saltado (slices of beef, grilled sweet peppers and onions, fried potatoes, and rice), papa rellana (mashed potato stuffed with meat, olives, egg), and causas (mashed potato rolled around a mix of avocado, seafood, mayonaise). Just what we needed.
So, it was lovely. And it was a reminder that there are lots of interesting and underappreciated neighborhoods of Lima. This one rarely gets a mention in the guide books, which is a shame.