Wednesday, December 3, 2008

La Molina Plaza: Our Local Shopping Center

As noted earlier, we live in an upper-middle-class area of Lima. Such areas didn't exist when I was a missionary here 42 years ago. The rise of the middle class is truly an amazing (and to me, surprising) development in the Peruvian economy.

Here's where we buy most of our household items and groceries, about a 10-minute walk from our apartment. Plaza Vea is a large chain of stores like Macey's in Utah.

The mall (plaza) has a Starbuck Coffee shop (look carefully at the green sign in the middle left), Pizza Hut, KFC, and Burger King (look carefully at the red sign in the middle right), among many other restaurants and store. The man in orange in the lower right is a parking lot guard.


Another store where we shop frequently is Wong, another big food chain. Both Plaza Vea and Wong have lots of American foods--but not brown sugar (or molasses), cream of tartar, baking powder, shortening, root beer, and a few other common American things.


Wong employees are all decked out in red, like the man here loading groceries into the trunk of a car. The employees are clean, neat and almost overly helpful . . . and they do not accept tips.


Our neighborhood gas station. I took this picture to show the prices. The lowest price listed is 11.34 soles per gallon, which comes out to almost US$4 per gallon! So please don't complain about the price of gas in the United States.

1 comment:

The Sorensons said...

Hi. My name is Tim Sorenson and my family and I will be moving to Peru at the end of April (I'll be working at the U.S. embassy). We will most likely be living in La Molina and I came across your blog because I was trying to get a better idea of what living conditions will be like. We are also LDS and have been in contact with a few LDS people in Peru that have been answering our questions. I'm not sure if your home is near the temple, but we are most likely going to live in that area. Maybe we will run into you when we get down there. My e-mail is timo2mx@yahoo.com and we also have a blog at timandbrooke.blogspot.com. I would love to hear from you and get more information about life in Peru. Thanks