El Rastro. And “Peruvian” Food Afterwards.

I’ve already mentioned in a couple of posts that, a week ago, my friend Maria and I spent the day in Madrid. We meandered through El Rastro for hours, with the sun on our faces and the crowd thronging.

El Rastro is an enormous open air flea/artisan market held every Sunday in a part of town called La Latina. It’s crammed to the rafters with rusty old junk (aka “antiques”), delightful trinkets and arty stuff.

I’ve finally managed to go through the pics, and here’s a selection:

I’d not be surprised if a quite a few of those opened random doors in Toledo!

Eeeeeek… that’s me first thing in the morning!

The Rastro is fun, but what’s missing, in my opinion, is food stalls. In the UK or in Germany, they’d have filled this glaring gap (and quite a few ravenous punters) by now.

No matter. While waiting for a bunch of Maria’s friends to join us, we stumbled across an interesting restaurant not far off the market, serving ‘Peruvian fusion’ cuisine. We had to wait for ages to get a table outside, and the service was excruciatingly slow, but the food was worth waiting for.

Deep-fried wontons with sweet and sour chicken, vegetables and mango. Definitely more “fusion” than “Peruvian”. Ten out of ten, though, for taste, and another ten out of ten for photogenicity 🙂

We absolutely had to order Peru’s signature dish, ceviche. You’ll find endless variations of this marinated fish and/or seafood dish all over Latin America. This one was delicious!

Beef stir fry. Also pretty tasty.

It sure was a colourful day 🙂