Annalisa en Panamá

Several of my offspring visited me during the third week of February, a visit I'd been looking forward to for a while -- and the week was just as wonderful as I'd hoped it would be.  One recurring delight for me that week was the chance to reflect on how much I've learned about Panama, and how I got to share some of my favorite parts. More on those favorite parts below! I also took a bit of grim satisfaction in sharing pieces of the arduousness of my everyday experience here: running with my daughter and her boyfriend in the heat, waiting for the bus (I call it, "playing the bus lottery") and riding a particularly crowded one, experiencing the intense heat of walking, say, across the Ciudad del Saber campus to my office, getting caught in a thunderstorm, despite the fact that we're supposedly in the "dry" season. But the excursions . . . those were really fantastic. Here's the rundown of the big things we did. Visit the Albrook bus terminal an...

In the beginning of February, Marco Rubio visited Panama.  This apparently consumed much embassy time (one of my embassy contacts, who'd hoped to help set up meetings for me with other Fulbright people in Chiriquí while I was there, had to bug out to work on getting ready for the visit). In the meanwhile, certain streets here in the city started looking like it was November again.  (As a reminder, November is a month full of national holiday after holiday, and Panamanian flags sprout up like Kansas corn in August).  So it felt a little out of season, here in February, to see the route from the airport to the U.S. Embassy with Panamanian flags on every lamppost, and also hanging on the fences in between posts. The bus I take to the Ciudad del Saber goes past the embassy, and so I wasn't surprised to see flags on every bus shelter, too. It's a message to Rubio and to anyone listening in the U.S. The buses have displays on the front that alternate flashing the route and some...