Lima is.

Here's a traveler's mantra I formulated about a year ago: if you want to get a good idea of country's personality, get a local to take you shopping. Real shopping.

I tested this theory in Poland, Turkey and Ukraine, with fully satisfactory results. The Poles, friendly enough but wary of and slightly impatient with foreigners, typically avoid eye contact but make no attempt at a rip-off. Thus, I deduced that Poland is a land of generally honest and warm but guarded individuals. Ukrainians, on the other hand, snap and grumble their inevitable impatience and adopt coercive tactics to make the sale – evidence, at least in my opinion, of their centuries of experience with being screwed themselves. Turks are ingratiatingly helpful - almost obsequious - but insincerely so. Shopping for dresses with M in the giant textile region of Istanbul, I must have tried on clothes in fifteen different stores, each time finding myself the recipient of fake smiles, a dozen “suggestions” hung over the fitting room door and gushing exclamations regarding my striking beauty. This last was reason enough to label the whole country a bunch of shameless frauds, but I didn't. I did, however, leave with the impression that Turkey is a land of shrewd, pragmatic opportunists.

Today I went shopping in Lima.

I should note that I live in Miraflores, the picturesque, touristy part of Lima where the Westerners and wealthy locals congregate. Nothing there, I am told, is representative of Peru or even Lima. There is shopping in Miraflores, of course, the prices absurdly inflated and the shops almost exclusively Western. Buildings seem to be colorful expressions of individualism rather than functional structures. Parks and gardens are obsessively manicured and feature dozens of fastidiously maintained flower beds, the brilliantly multihued occupants of which are always arranged in the shape of a heart or some such. The locals are friendly, smiling and helpful. Of course I want to shop there. But I didn't move here to spend a year in a gilded little bubble.

After a bone-jarring bus ride into wherever it was we actually went, I and my three companions – one of my roommates and two local girls – debarked to the standard Peruvian symphony of blowing horns and screeching brakes. I looked around and realized I must have entered the “real” Lima: the surrounding buildings were forlorn, crumbling structures painted drab greens and grays. Trash littered the sidewalks and black, grimy water pooled in jagged holes in the decades-old pavement. Traffic was worse than any I'd seen before and seemingly undirected by man or machine. The air smelled simultaneously acrid and stale, a slightly-nauseating mixture of body odor, garbage, fried food and urine. Toothless street vendors accosted us immediately, offering a cheap assortment of men's undershirts, wallets, hairbrushes and jewelry.

As we entered the market, I realized how very, very big the place actually was. It must have spanned ten blocks in both directions, packed to the absolute limit with shoppers and vendors alike. The outdoor shops, generally about the size of a standard American living room, were crammed haphazardly onto each block, generously decorated with signs declaring DESCUENTOS and OFERTAS. The indoor shops – each really just a kiosk space, about the height and width of a bunk bed, inside a large mazelike warehouse – spilled onto their neighbors. The shop assistants were aged and tired-looking, their responses and faces the very embodiment of indifference.

What really got my attention were the mannequins – at least five of them to each shop. In the States, mannequins are one of the very few remaining solely utilitarian objects. Measurements are standardized and reasonably normal, and the “hair” is generally a few cursory waves incised as part of the structure itself. The Peruvian mannequins, on the other hand, are fiberglass monuments to sex and highly idealized feminine beauty. Heavily made-up, impossibly narrow-waisted, big-boobed and voluptuous, the mannequins' glittering, lidless stare followed us throughout each labyrinthine warehouse. We chanced to wander through the kids' section and I stopped, appalled, when I noticed “Sexy Kids!” emblazoned across one shop's exterior. Inside were miniature versions of the earlier mannequins, clad in appropriately kid-like garb but stuffed with newspaper in the hip area to create the illusion of womanly curves. That, in fact, really was nauseating.

Navigation was tricky. I tried to follow Melina, one of the locals, but lost her repeatedly in the swarm of females of similar (identical?) height, hair length, and clothing. “Kate!” Courtney would yell, having managed somehow to keep up, and I'd fumble to locate the direction of her voice and rejoin the othes. It was impossible to walk in a straight line and at some moments even to move, crowded as it was and as hard as we tried to avoid the brash, aggressive street vendors. “Gringa”, several of them sneered at me, gesturing lewdly and laughing all the while. I've seen too much to be offended by so little but was nonetheless repulsed.

Unattended children were everywhere, some of them mere toddlers. They squatted, barefoot, in the rare open spaces and played with dirty toys. Others wandered about uncertaintly with a bereft expression. Some just huddled in doorways and looked out imploringly at the passing crowd.

Courtney and I, uninitiated outsiders and accustomed to a decidedly more spacious retail environment, tired of the excursion within an hour, I'm slightly ashamed to say. By the time the four of us reached the street and Melina found a cab, I had developed a massive headache and a grouchy mood. The jostling, the shoving, the constant malodorous contact and the welter of emotions I felt regarding the experience made me anxious to get away and get alone.

As we eased into the late afternoon traffic and joined the cars heading back toward Miraflores, I noticed a campaign billboard overhead. Mayoral elections are being held in Lima in November, I think, and the candidates are campaigning hard. This billboard, featuring a candidate whose name I cannot recall, proclaimed, in patriotic red and white, “SOMOS PERU!” We are Peru.

After today, I cannot (or perhaps just don't want to) say anymore that my little mantra is correct. I don't want it to be. Who is Peru? Two weeks into my one-year stay, I don't yet know. I may not ever. I never wanted or intended to come to South America. My experience with Spanish-speaking cultures is confined to the Latin Foods aisle at Wal-Mart and the kitchen staff at every restaurant I've ever worked at. I don't know who Peru is. I do, however, know who I don't want her to be, and that is the stinking, broken, cheap, wholly undignified world I stepped into today.

I returned home this evening to the clean streets and placid cheerfulness of Miraflores, feeling uneasily as though I'd glimpsed the proverbial emperor's nudity. And looked away quickly.

But not quickly enough.