This past weekend, Christine and I went to the small town of La Pintada to visit our Peace Corps friend Gabby, who’s been the town’s English specialist for the past couple of years. Besides an opportunity to get out of our mostly-English-speaking, honking-traffic-filled bubble here in Panama City, the town was also having their seventh annual regional Festival of the Painted Sombrero, or Festival Del Sombrero Pintado (or Pinta’o, since folks like dropping the D here).

After three hours on a tiny chiva-bus (those winding hills and turns never felt so strenuous on the much larger Santiago bus, despite being on the same one and only highway through Panama) we were happy to see Gabby and meet her 2.5 cats – Luna and Valentine, her sibling housecats, and a recently fostered scruffy and tough looking black cat she’d named Zeus. Poor Zeus was looking a lot more scruffy then his street-wise life usually caused; he’d had a pot of boiling water thrown on him by (luckily unknown, for their safety from me reciprocating) local children. Gabby had seen him around the neighborhood for months but after seeing him limping and staggering around the market with pus-covered wounds on his back and most of his hair missing, she swept in, took him to her backyard and got him all the salves and ointments he’d need to start his way toward recovery. Even in pain, he was cordially friendly towards Christine and I, purring quietly, bumping his leathery black-skinned head onto our hands, and accepting chin scratches. Zeus needs a home; Gabby’s two plump and spoiled Panamanian housecats are spooked enough just seeing him out the window, much less seeing his scruffy head inside the house (which he was able to poke through the door once despite our attempts to stop it; he knows a good place when he smells it).

Zeus: Burned but not beaten (mentally, at least)

After Gabby fed us and her other visiting friends a chili dinner, we wandered in the darkness of the warm evening toward the festival grounds. They were filled with food and trinket vendors ($1 Atlas beers!), carnival rides, and an obnoxious, screaming DJ running a dance pit called “Zoomba Live”

We watched some fireworks, meandered the trinket vendors, chatted with the Panamanian friends of Gabby and her fellow American Peace Corps friends, and rode the bumper cars. They have an interesting system here for that – instead of waiting in line for the ride with your money or tickets, I paid $2 for a little pink chit from a window, and then just….walked out onto the bumper car floor when everyone stopped. I was intrigued to see each bumper car had a little chit slot in it, and once deposited and the floor timer started, we all zoomed off. There were no lines at all; if you had bought 20 chits you could theoretically be bumpin’ all night. Everyone off the floor just had to watch and wait for when someone got up and left, then run out quickly to claim a car. I bumped many a small Latino child in the 3 minutes my chit bought me.

Gabby and friends at the bumper wheels

The highlight of the evening was watching the stage show – couplets of traditionally-dressed dancers, musicians in the background, and then the (8? I think?) ladies that were the queens of their towns in the Pintada district of Panama. Of course the La Pintada local woman got huge, deafening cheers since she was the hometown favorite, but all the other ladies, each with their own teams of local fans sporting balloons and flags in different bright colors, got resounding applause as well.

Flags and balloons wave as the regional winners all take the stage at once

After that, we checked out the dance party we’d been hearing for hours. We paid our $2 admission to the fenced off area (at least the beers were still $1 inside) and watched the Panamanians….standing around and checking their phones. No one was dancing, or even wobbling from side to side. I’ll admit that the typical Panamanian radio and live DJ style doesn’t exactly lend itself to ecstatic dancing – basically, every 30 seconds to 2 minutes, the DJ will scream out something in rapid Spanish like “put your hands in the air!” “if you’re with a special someone raise your hands!” “if you’re from here in Pinta’a raise your hands!” and by far his most frequent one “ZOOOOOOOMBA LIIIIIIIIIVE!!” (or a pre-recorded, deep, movie trailer announcement of the company name) It was, to our dainty little USA ears, hilariously inappropriate and we guffawed whenever the DJ would interrupt the music he was paid to present to scream the name of his company (which was also plastered on every surface). We couldn’t imagine a DJ in the USA doing this, and we wondered why Panamanians were okay with the music constantly, constantly being interrupted by repetitive, unimportant drivel. If it was a bit of banter between songs or tracks, or every couple of minutes, that’d be one thing…but it was every minute!

I’m a professional hammocker

Continue reading this post…

At around 10pm last evening, there was suddenly more honking than usual on Via España, outside our condo. We’re used to beeps, car alarms (oh the car alarms), muffled thuds, and the grumble of buses. But this noise went on for quite awhile.

It turns out that Panama has won the right to enter the World Cup competition for the first time in their team’s history, and people were ecstatic. The honking and partying continuing well into the morning (4am, if my bloodshot eyes read the phone correctly), but good for them. Compared with the poor ol’ USA team (their first no-admittance into the World Cup since 1986, I hear) it’s about time they had their shot. It’s a tiny country with a fiercely proud people, and they have every right to be.

This morning I was out volunteering in Chorillo with the English Language tutoring for the intercity kids, and boy, did I get my face rubbed in it (teasingly, I think). The kids shout their Spanish quite rapidly so I needed to have them repeat their ribbing of the USA’s team several times before I understood that my beloved soccer team was being drubbed. Oh well…better luck next year.

The president of Panama even declared a national holiday – all public schools and public business to be suspended. They sure do love futbol here!

Posing with the Resolute Bay

The prize for “first international visitors” goes to Christine’s wonderful parents, Linda and Dave, who came out this past weekend for a whirlwind trip to Panama City and the famous Canal. Just when I thought I’d go crazy without a functioning cell phone, too, Linda and Dave were there to deliver my Amazon order of a new Galaxy S8. This one won’t be going in salt water, ever.

Linda with…a tiny demon?! Look out!

Just like our first night in Panama City, we took them to the Del Prado 24 hour diner next to our apartment, and they enjoyed meeting their temporary “grandkitty” Arriba. Dave the handyman had even made her a little scratching post of her very own with high quality sisal rope. She took to it, and the grandparents, immediately. I’m sure she enjoyed smelling the curious smells of her older brothers, Bert and Po, all over everything that was brought into her house. Christine and I both got sick from our Santa Catalina trip last week (the previous blog post covers the pounding rain which may have contributed) so we tried our absolute best not to sneeze on our visitors.

Friday, we took them into Casco Viejo for a look at the ‘trendy’ parts of PC. Hotel Tantalo, where we’d had a great dinner a couple weeks ago, and just wandered through some small fruit and vegetable markets. An interesting aspect of Casco is that you can see the faded glory of the European architecture (since it was the Spanish who had controlled Panama for 300 years, long before the USA and their canal) now crumbling into dust in the moist, rainy climate. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the old city; so many beautiful apartments and edifices that now are filled with weeds and even trees inside of them.

This facade is along Avenida Central, prime real estate, and still looks beautiful despite the wear

Saturday was the Canal Tour, something David and I had been looking forward to. We took a tour bus up to Gamboa, where we had done the Pipeline Hike a few weeks before, and boarded the Pacific Queen tour ferry to take us south, descending slowly through three locks to reach the Pacific Ocean. This is called a “half canal tour” – we would not be experiencing the “rising” water in the locks from the Atlantic, up to the high point in the water.

We entered right around the little blue tail of river you see connecting in. Photo courtesy of BrightHubEngineering.com

The trip was relaxing and informative. Our Panamanian narrator, Gus, spoke English easily and fluently, and was receptive my (many) questions between his speeches in Spanish, then English, then turning over the mic to a pretty blonde German woman who repeated everything again in Deutsch. There was a nice breeze, and plenty of shade onboard (and air conditioned interior cabins with a bar, but we never bothered to go in there – we all stayed on the top-most deck the entire time to watch the shores go by).

We went through three locks – Miguelito, Miraflores, and then the third one which while technically a separate third lock on its own, was only a couple hundred meters from Miraflores. Each one took about 20-30 minutes from start to finish, but much of that was taken up by waiting for a giant container ship behind us, the Resolute Bay, to get into position in the lock behind us each time. The Pacific Queen “tied up” with simple ropes onto moorings at the front of the lock, and the Resolute Bay was dragged forward on taut lines, carried by electronic train cars called “mules” (flesh and blood mules were used on the Eerie Canal, but never in Panama…the name was applied anyway!) that moved quietly and smoothly forward with taut lines held on the port and starboard sides of the giant container, making sure that it would be held exactly in the middle of the lock and not scrape against the hundred-year old sides.

The crazy thing is how well this was engineered a century ago. All the lock’s gates are hollow and lightweight, so each one of the 20-30 foot tall behemoths only need a tiny little 25-horsepower motor to move them. The gates have no rubber gaskets at their joining; using only the massive water pressure behind them to hold them tightly closed. The mules themselves have been replaced twice over the century, with newer and more efficient models, but they’ve always been little electric train cars, running on a track. All and all, I was quite impressed.

You can see four of the eight mules tugging the Resolute Bay along

I thought the Canal might be more valuable economically to the country then it actually seems to be. Gus estimated the money it brings through fees to be between $1.5-2 billion USD per year, but according to Wikipedia, Panama’s GDP is somewhere in the range of $55 billion. Since it only costs $600 million a year to run the thing, it’s definitely a solid moneymaker, but at only 1% of the GDP…it doesn’t seem as important as I assumed it would be.

Continue reading this post…

Postcard time

Last weekend Christine, Rachael, David and myself decided to explore the more tropical aspects of Panama with a trip out to Santa Catalina, on the Pacific coast of the country. Christine and David are both avid SCUBA divers, and Rachael and I contented ourselves with snorkeling. The trip from Santiago out to the coast, in our friends’ adorable, under-powered little “Volkswagen Polo” (or the Pollo; the Chicken Car, as we affectionately called it) was an adventure in itself. The car seemed to have some difficulty starting at random intervals (a bad battery, David the driver and general mechanic/engineer minded fellow, was thinking) and we weren’t sure if we’d have enough gas to make it. We consulted with some friendly villagers out somewhere in the jungle, and they confirmed that there simply were no gas stations here. You flagged down a pickup truck that had some jugs of gasoline in them, and that’s how you filled up. Whoops. Guess we should have done that back in Santiago.

(Meanwhile, the horrible-yet-horribly-popular old Latin American “Reggaeton” song of “Da Me Mas Gasolina” (Give Me More Gasoline) bounced around in my head.)

Weaving and wobbling around the potholes merrily on underfilled sport-rimmed tires, we crunched into Santa Catalina around 6pm, and met the cheery European women running the dive shop right away before finding our AirBnB, in order for the divers to be fitted for their suits and other gear, and for the snorkelers to try on our flippers.

What a view from the patio outside our bedroom doors!

At the AirBnB, we met Luis, a shaggy haired, surfer-looking young caretaker for the owners, and the family of four cats they kept – all adorable, and some more friendly than others. Mister Mormont, the solemn face, flat-eared patriarch, his seldomly-seen girlfriend Mia, and their two adorable sons Nahamet and BooBoo (the latter named by the homeowner’s daughter). BooBoo and Mister Mormont were the most friendly of the bunch and constantly wound themselves our ankles, purring. Mister Mormont, despite his huge and muscular tomcat body, had the cutest little “mew!” when he wanted to be pet.

From L->R – Mormont, Nahamet in the plant, Mia presiding, BooBoo licking

We had an early dinner (things shut down early in these tiny, sleeper surfer towns) of octopus and fish and lots of cheap local beer and turned in, listening to the sound of the waves crashing on the beach a mere 50 meters from us.

Bright and early the next morning, we met our Austrian dive guide Sophia and our fifth tourist member, another Austrian named Sasha, and clambered onto the extremely small fiberglass boat to be carried out to our dive sites. This little thing did not handle waves in a comfortable manner; we were getting 3-6 feet of air with every crest and I could feel my vertebral discs compact with each impact. Some of our party were prone to sea-sickness; staring at the horizon, scanning for whales, seemed to help.

The trip took an hour or so, and after 40 minutes….we saw three! I wasn’t able to get my Samsung smartphone out in time, nor did I have a good grip on it with all the bouncing we were doing – sans wrist strap. Christine had been dreaming about seeing whales for years and the dream was finally fulfilled; one of the whales even did the dramatic, movie-style tail flip as it dived under. I’d seen whales before, but never such a nice photo-op flip before. Shame we don’t have any pictures, but I’m hoping Rachael and David can share their GoPro shots eventually. They had a nice wrist-mounted holster for the GoPro so they might even have some steady, non-bouncing footage!

Rachael (hopefully) got some great underwater shots

Sasha, David, and Christine went in, and Rachael and I were joined by a quiet Panamanian guide named Saldus. Last time I went snorkeling was at the Red Sea in Jordan in 2015, after our Dead2Red victory. Branden and I both discovered that mustaches do not make for a good mask seal, but I had forgotten since then so I spent a lot of the snorkeling that day hacking up saltwater and dumping out the contents of my mask. Oh well; I like my mustache more than I need perfect snorkeling conditions. I saw some animals I’d never seen before though; a swimming sea turtle, a couple of white-tipped sharks, and a Longtail Ray.

I also saw the rare, beautiful rubber-encased Land Turtle

Continue reading this post…

Not pictured: sky opening up 5 minutes later and pouring rain for 2 hours

I can’t believe I’ve only been here a month and already I’ve fallen behind on getting any information posted. A lot has happened in the 20-ish days since I last wrote. Christine and I have gone on a few hikes, made some new people-friends, and one particularly special little furry friend.

First of all, we got a Pricesmart membership. This sounds boring as heck I’m sure, but one thing that now as a “month-long native” I can say – it’s damned expensive to live in the downtown bustling parts of Panama City. A lot of native Panamanians have been kind of priced-out of living here; groceries, restaurants, and housing are all quite pricey around here and get better the farther you get from the epicenter of the city…basically only a 15 minute walk south from our apartment is the coast with the fanciest apartments and pricey parts, and the farther you branch of north in all directions, the more affordable things are. So Pricesmart, a Costco-esque kind of store, was a godsend for us. 5 pounds of frozen Carolina ground turkey? Uh, yeah of course. We’ll totally be able to cut through that with a kitchen knife and be able to make separate 1lb recipes of spaghetti and not be stuck making a quintuple batch all at once and causing us to have a month’s worth of spaghetti sauce in the fridge and freezer. Because that totally didn’t end up happening. Sure.

My father would either be proud or ashamed of me for such a ridiculously large Bulk Ground Turkey purchase

But they also have all kinds of housewares of course, just like Costco, and a hamburger/hotdog/pizza stand that is exempt from the 7% tax that EVERY other non-grocery business in Panama City is subject to (somehow they must have gotten the food categorized as groceries). Not much choice (if you want peanut butter and jelly, you better like massive containers of Jif and Smuckers, grape-only) but great prices for buying certain things in bulk. We’re going to make up the $35 annual membership fee easily on 1.75l jugs of alcohol alone – one of the few things that is actually quite cheap throughout Panama. A 1.75 of the local rum, Ron Abuelo (which, amusingly, I had no idea the Spanish word for rum is ron, leading me to think that the rum was named Grandpa Ron) is only $13. And the pizzas are so far, my favorite stuff in Panama. Unfortunately, that says a lot about the local pizza scene. Or about my taste in pizza.

*looks about furtively* Am I really doing this? Am I paying $17 for a giant body pillow in a Central American Costco?

Fridge now fully stocked, we could turn to making friends. We found a fun Whatsapp group (requiring me to join Whatsapp, something I think most Americans could say “What is that App, and who uses it?” the answer being “people not from the USA or China”) for Fast Friending with both locals and expats, and have gone out to dinner a few times with folks at some nice restaurants, and done a couple hikes around the area. The first was last-second just the two of us (our hiking buddies had to drop out the morning of) but we had fun looking at the various giant spiders, centipedes, and a troupe of tiny monkeys.

Up the first hill

Congratulations! She did it!

The Parque Metropolitano is only $4 for foreigners to enter ($1 for natives I think) and is pretty small, but has some nice informational signs and great views south over the city. I think it’d be possible to see all of its trails in only about 6-8 hours. Moments after we reached its summit and chatted with a half dozen young, fit German college students (one of them was even from Marktoberdorf, where I did my choir concert 7 years ago) and they took the picture at the top of the page, a light trickle began as we were heading down from the summit. The Germans jogged past us in rain slickers, hoods up, but Christine and I didn’t have rain jackets – only my umbrella. We stood for 15 minutes under the branches of a tall, rain-stopping tree, hoping it would stop, but no use. We sprinted down through the rivulets on the trail, finding by sheer luck a covered rest area with 3-4 beautiful golden orb spiders along the edges, each one with a legspread the size of my handspan. They kept to their edge area and we kept to our center, though (even though the wind and rain blew their massive webs crazily towards us, often as much as 3-4 feet closer. I pictured the rain suddenly snapping the webs as I photographed them and the hand-sized spider blowing onto my face. I believe I’d suddenly like spiders a lot less than I do now if that had happened).

We’ll get out of here someday…

That night, the Whatsapp friend group suddenly buzzed with a flurry of activity as I was reading a novel. Christine suddenly became very focused on the computer. Turns out a friend of ours from the group had found a little kitten in his building elevator. He sent a video to the group showing her meowing, batting at his feet, and rubbing against his legs. He told the group he couldn’t adopt her due to his father being allergic, and even though Christine and I can’t keep any cats long term in our building or in our lives (Po would probably die of a brain aneurysm if shown a second sibling to tolerate) she messaged the group that she could stay with us, until we could find her a Forever Home. Our friend posted a second video of the kitten on his lap, sleeping, as he drove (didn’t ask how he did that safely) with the words “We’re coming for you, Mama Christine!”

I said…huh? What’s going on? As Christine got up to do a late night store hunt for kitty litter and cat food. I went out into the night in my pajamas and found the SUV and was handed the cat, who cuddled into my hands and purred. I’d never seen such a tiny cat before. She was pretty clean, with no obvious fleas or matted fur, and she gazed up at me with lidded, almost mascara’d looking eyes and squeaked at me. I made a little home for her in the small “maid’s bathroom” off the kitchen with the Cinammon Toast Crunch box (from Pricesmart, judging by its large size!) that she’d been delivered in, and we waited for Mama Christine to return. She climbed up onto my shoulder and licked my ears, rubbing up against them and purring, and then fell asleep on my chest.

“Pay attention to me! I’m a tiny street cat!”

And that’s how little Arriba (named after the Spanish word for “Up” to commemorate her fateful elevator trip that night) came to be with us. I’ve never had a kitten before, or even an adult cat of my own. Despite being the son of a small-animal vet and the brother to a mixed-practice vet, I’ve never really had the time or interest in being a Cat Dad. But here in Panama, without a job to distract me and lots of time and love to give….it’s been a pretty nice past two weeks having her here with me while Christine’s at work.

Chest cat

Continue reading this post…

I never would have guessed that Panama City would be Condo-Land

Is a very very very fine casa. As of yesterday afternoon, Christine and I are moved into our new condo tower, in the neighborhood of El Cangrejo. Our realtor, Rosalind of Panama Signature Realty has been amazing; I toured it solo about a week ago, while Christine was at the USA Embassy for her introductory meetings, and Rosalind was right – it fit all the criteria we asked for. Only a 5 minute walk to the metro, fully furnished, a small but neat balcony overlooking the city, an incredibly large rooftop pool, and two nice bedrooms. Three bathrooms if you can believe it. Apparently it’s very common, even in “medium price” housing like this (that’s in comparison to the sort of thing most expats usually live in; I haven’t been around the area enough to know what Panamanians live in!) to have a “maid’s area” with a tiny area for a cot, and a little but full bathroom with sink, toilet, and shower. Only cold water, though, goes to it! Sadistic. It was the same at the condo of Christine’s coordinator, Rick, which is a 3 bedroom and 4.5 bathroom unit overlooking the ocean – only cold water for the maid’s area!

We camped here last night; the electricity only got connected this afternoon while I was out getting some food and ice to keep it on. Suddenly my phone goes off and when I hold it to my ear, it’s the security guard from our building. My spanish is still terrible but I manage to understand that the electricity guy has arrived, and he wants Christine’s phone number. Haha, I don’t know why he called me first, though – he has both our numbers and he knows I can barely speak any spanish. Needless to say, though, I grabbed a celebratory sixpack of the local beer, Balboa Roja, now that I knew we’d have a working fridge to keep it in.

Last night though, we stumbled around in the dark with Rick’s solar-charged camping lamp, trying to unpack our 4 massive, airplane-checked-luggage-limit bags just enough to get situated. The condo was a bit musty, but that’s par for the course here. We’ve heard that even food in sealed bags will get moldy here unless you keep your kitchen air conditioned 24/7. The bed’s sheets definitely need a washing, but of course that had to wait until we had electrical power to start the in-unit washer/dryer combo unit.

There was some mild growing pains that come from two midwesterners who have zero condo experience suddenly being the renters of a multi hundred thousand dollar valued condo. When the power came on, we discovered that three of the light switches were totally dead, as well as one light fixture. Two maintenance guys in the building, wearing official polo shirts of the building, spent a couple hours in here replacing them, but then they needed to be paid. Christine thought that would be covered by our rental (and I’m sure Rosalind will reimburse us) but we all had to explain that condos operate totally differently from apartment rentals; every wire and pipe that crosses the wall into “our condo” becomes “our problem” and not that of the building folks.

The internet gets set up tomorrow (hopefully) by Cable Onda. Christine really wanted some local cable channels, and there’s no over-the-air broadcasts here, but we got a pretty good package deal of 30Mb/s + 200 channels (more than I’ll ever need to watch!) for $58 a month, which even includes the $4 modem rental. Thankfully though, Claro mobile doesn’t block me from tethering, which is how I’m delivering this blog entry to you.

More pictures soon, once our internet gets installed! Super tired at the moment; just cooked Christine her first nice dinner while she’s hard at working building a presentation to take to Santiago, Panama next week for a three hour long seminar. I’m so proud of her!

It’s an even better view at night!