Photos

Photos from July and Kendal and Courtney´s visit to Panama.

https://picasaweb.google.com/paulspicturesfromabroad/KandCtriptoPanam?authkey=Gv1sRgCP37qqXOmInEVw

https://picasaweb.google.com/paulspicturesfromabroad/PanamaJuly?authkey=Gv1sRgCJjVgreq57LKNQ

When friends come to visit

Two weekends ago my friends, Kendal and Courtney came to visit me here in Panama. Good times! I got to play tourist and show them around, and we checked out the Panama Canal, the metropolitan park which is a forest in the city with monkeys (which we didn´t see), Casco Viejo, Calle Uruguay, and the Isla Contadora. Their visit was also accompanied by lots of good food and cold beverages.

Unfortunately, the first three days of their visit was accompanied by almost nonstop rain, the most rain I´ve seen in Panama over a three day period. While this didn´t prevent us from going out and doing stuff it meant that our forays were a little soggier than normal. It also meant that on Saturday our flight to Isla Contadora was canceled after we spent all day in the airport waiting for it due to the rain.

However, on Sunday the sun finally came out and we managed to fly to the nice beaches of Isla Contadora. In addition to laying out in the sun at the beach and watching the geckos eat things at night we also went snorkeling (awesome) and whale watching (also awesome).

All in all a good time.

In other news, my trip here is starting to wrap up. I only have four days of work left and I return to the US in just over a week. My only remaining Panama plans are to finish up my internship and to spend the weekend at the beach in Bocas del Toro, which I have heard is both cool and fun.

A trip to San Blas

This weekend I took a trip to the islands of San Blas. The San Blas islands are beautiful remote desert islands on the Caribbean side of Panama. Despite being ¨remote¨ the actual trip only took about 4 hours as Panama has recently built a road (an incredibly curvy road) to the islands. Before the only practical way to get to the islands was to the fly there. The islands are home to an indigenous people, the Kuna, who after a revolution in 1925 managed to achieve a fair amount of autonomy.

Getting there turned out to be filled with excitement as our 12 foot long motorboat had its outboard motor fall off, ran out of gas, and ran into a concrete dock dropping off a passenger on a different island! (one of the crazier boat trips I have been on … except for some sailing shenanigans). I feel kind of lucky that we weren´t stranded in between islands for hours. Luckily, motor was tied by ropes to the boat so when it fell off it didn´t sink and the driver and the guide were able to pull it back on to the boat before the engine flooded. We were similarly lucky that when we ran out of gas we were close enough to an island that someone was able to canoe out to us with a 2 liter bottle filled with gas.

The island itself was incredibly beautiful and picturesque. This was the first time I´d ever been to such a tropical beach and it lived up to my expectations.

http://www.wallpaperweb.org/wallpaper/nature/1440x1080/Los_Grillos_Islands_San_Blas_Archipelago_Panama.jpg

I found it incredibly relaxing. There was nothing to do but hangout on the beach all day, either in a hammock or in the sand (in the two days I read about 500 pages). The beach itself was relatively deserted with only a couple of people on it. Each day I took a side snorkeling trip and saw a sunken boat with some colorful fish and a bunch of giant starfish. The lodge was a little rustic, the floor was sand, but I was perfectly fine with that. For food I ate chicken, noodles, rice, crab, pineapple, coconut and lobster.

In sum it was a great trip.

Weather

Since I´ve gotten here the weather has all been pretty much the same, relatively hot with intermittent storms.

However, until checking out weather.com today (for the first time since I arrived in Panama) I hadn´t realized exactly how unchanging the weather is.

http://www.weather.com/weather/tenday/PMXX0004

In other words I think I know what to expect for tomorrow.

How to Greet Strangers

The other day, I accompanied two coworkers to visit the construcution of a school in the town of Chorrera. Because we only had a vague idea of where the school construction was occurring, when we got to Chorrera we spent a bunch of time stopping and asking for directions. Here are the various ways that our driver greeted strangers before asking for directions.

Mi Amor - My Love
Jefe - Boss
Reina - Queen
Primo - Cousin
Mami - Mother?

I really enjoy the use of very familiar language to greet a stranger.

I also like it when English terms get picked up or adopted. Some english words that I have noticed here in Panama

Ghetto - pronounced guetto
cool - spelled kul
bling -

New Experiences

On Friday, taking the taxi to work I saw the craziest thing of my trip (so far). The taxi driver had a live pet squirrel in the car!

At first I thought it was just a stuffed animal perched on the dashboard … but then it blinked and moved its head … I must admit I was somewhat startled and glad that I was in the back seat.

I will say that the squirrel was rather well behaved. Despite the typical aggressive taxi driving, the squirrel never left the dashboard. It had a shoe string tied around one of its legs, but it could have easily leaped off the dashboard if had wanted to. For the most part it was hunched over like it was going to jump.

One of my coworkers always says how incredible the people are in Panama. Of course he wasn't too surprised by this story.

Weekend Surf trip

Last weekend I went to beach at El Palmar to go surfing. On Saturday, I took surf classes and on Sunday I did it by myself. I managed to stand up a bunch of times in the class, due to the instructor's instructions, but only once on my own. Clearly I have a lot of work to do before I'm a world class surfer. The beach/hotel was very scenic, but it had the blackest sand that I've ever seen. Also it rained twice in the 2 days that I was there.

Unfortunately, I hadn't realized that there would be no ATM nearby the beach and that nobody would take a credit card so my second day I was forced to save the money in wallet by eating a 3 dollar lunch. Fortunately there was an empanada stand not too far away.

Regularly scheduled Update

Random Tidbits about Panama.

Baseball is about as popular here as soccer. Almost every night a Major League baseball game is on TV, usually of the Yankees or the Mets.

While many other Latin American cities have severe air pollution problems, Panama City luckily isn´t afflicted by this problem. I think this is not because Panama City produces less pollution but rather because nothing prevents the air pollution from being blown away.

I am glad that I am not a taxi driver in Panama. Not only is driving here hyper-aggressive but taxis are very cheap here (it costs me 2, 3 dollars to get to most places – which to me is the same cost as a metro ride). I imagine that the most that a taxi driver can earn in an hour is around 8 dollars and they have sizable costs of gas and insurance .

Nobody wear´s Panama hats here, which is not too surprising as they are Ecuadorian in origin. However, they are available for sale for tourists. I might have to buy one.

This week a coworker and I went to some Panamanian schools and talked to their principals about any problems they had in their schools. For the most part the schools were in reasonably good condition with some water damage here and there (one school had an abandoned floor). However, several schools had problems with their computers. For example, one school had 20 computers locked in a closet because there was no secure room for them to be placed in. In a couple of other schools, the computers had been damaged by power surges. Since these power surges occurred fairly regularly I still do not understand why the schools didn´t use surge protectors to protect their equipment.

Off to the beach this weekend!

Pictures from Panama

June photos from Panama.

https://picasaweb.google.com/paulspicturesfromabroad/JunePanama

Different Ways of Doing Things

One thing that has always interested me is different ways of doing things. This is particularly so when the current way of doing something is inefficient for example the qwerty keyboard system or dysfunctional such as Argentina's political system during most of the 20^th century.

Today, I learned that there are many different ways to write numbers. Through my Spanish classes I had become aware that instead of writing a million and one hundredth 1,000,000.01 like we do many countries write the number 1.000.000,01. At work this came up as Microsoft Word kept suggesting that I change my decimal points into commas. Assuming that this was a language based difference I took MS Word's suggestion and changed all my numbers in my paper only to find out that its actually a regionally based difference and that Panama and Central America write the numbers like we do in the United States while South America and Europe mostly write numbers the other way. In doing some research I also found out that apparently the Swiss would write the number 1'000'000.01, the Russians 1 000 000,01 and the Indians 1,00,000.01. Who knew?

In the food category of different ways of doing things, the follow up from Chile of mixing wine with Coke is that in Panama they put banana's on the grill and cook them peel and all. This is actually becoming my favorite way to eat bananas.

I would say that one of the cool things about traveling is the ability to see different ways of doing things, but I am not coming up with too many examples that don't involve food, driving, or street performers to back up this argument.

In the historical edition of different ways of doing things, while reading the Atlantic magazine online I ran across this photograph of a town crier reading England's declaration of war for WWII. Talk about antiquated! (and by that I'm obviously referring to declarations of war). I knew that town criers used to be common but I figured the practice died out by the 20^th century as literacy rates rose and people no longer needed to get there news orally. According to Wikipedia a couple of towns even have town criers today though the role seems to have changed to mostly ceremonial.