Potato Festival

This past weekend was the last weekend that my parents were in town and I spent the days before their arrival from the jungle trying to find restaurants to go to and things to do. A certain banner had caugt my eye everyday when I went to work and one day I looked it up when I got home. It was for the Potato Festival in Surco! SO EXCITING!! A potato fest in the capital of potatolandia. Looked up where it was and the hours and C and I met my parents there early on Sunday morning.

My first impression. Thats it? The festival occupied one side of the main plaza in Old Surco. The plaza itself is fun to see with an old colonial style yellow church on one side and basically want amounted to 3 other sides of restaurants. My excitment for potatoes quickly overcame my disappointment over the size of the festival. POTATOES!!! Non-touristy street fair!

There were two rows of stands and they either had potatoes or some other type of Andean food stuffs. There were stalls with just bread that C says you can last a long time and come from the mountains. (upon closer inspection this meant that they were dry and meant to be eaten with other items). There were food stalls that sold stews made of dried meat called Charqui, huge balls of Causa (yellow potato with chicken/tuna/crab filling), HUGE plates of Peruvian Chicken and rice or duck and rice, tamales, guinea pigs, and cebiches.

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Quinea Pigs


There were other stands that had New Andean foods such as a variety of different flours, whole oatmeal, 5 varieties of quinoa,

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fresh butter and cheese, ham, and natural products. I think that Peru is the place to be if you are allergic to gluten or want health food products to change out mainstream ones. There was a stall with wine made from different roots and made from the prickly pear fruit, two stalls had coffee made from the carob tree and then...there were the potatoes!

Of the more than 3.000 varieties of potatoes grown we only saw many 100...I must say it is difficult to see the difference in all of them, but some are very easy to point out. One stall had just bags of different colored potatoes ranging from bright yellow to purple. One guy had this lumpy bumpy red ones and one was the general potato stall where they had little bags of potatoes to show with its name. We found the common red potato-it is called Gringo which basically means foreigner, but in a kinda rude way. Some of them look like little turds...and most of them are lumpy bumpy. I dunno how we got our common variety ones to be so smooth. It was amazing to see so many types of different potatoes. What was most interesting wasn´t the number of types, but the shapes and the colors that they came in.

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Colored potatoes!

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The display stand

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The recognizable red potato

We listened to a farmer explain how the keep the plant bug free. He told us about one bug that will crawl 40km is one night and how the basically suffocate it underground using huge sheets of plastic. They also kill the flying ones using vegetable based insecticides. They take bitter plants and boil them down and then spray it into the air and it keeps the bugs away. It was great to see a farmer there explaining his work and not some guy in a business suit with a fancy presentation.

We spent probably a good 1.5 walking around that one street street fair. It was so much fun and so exciting to see something off the beaten track-for tourists at least:) I loved not just the little street fair, but just the people/life/culture watching that we were able to do just by being there. My mom bought some hand woven cloths that are gorgeous and we were all tempted to try the food but couldn´t quite get ourselves over the fear of stomach bugs. Next time...

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Bascially what my mother bought and one made of alpaca