A grocery shopping date
By the time we'd been almost a week in Panama, my guy and I were getting our feet underneath us more and more. We'd been learning our way around; he'd bought a bike and I'd gotten a bus pass; I'd set up my office in the Ciudad del Saber and found a church; he'd tracked down grocery stores and several hills to cycle on.
With so much of our arrangements coming together so nicely, when my host let me know she'd be out-of-town on other business, we decided to have a little bit of a date together last Wednesday morning.
Plan 1: Visit the Mira Flores Locks (Las esculas de Mira Flores)
It's not too far from us, say the car drivers. Without a car, though, it's a 2km walk over a steep hill, together with a bus ride, and then about another mile of more walking. Neil eventually nixed the idea because his weather app said it would be raining all morning.
Comment 1 on weather watching: Because he is a bicyclist, weather apps are to Neil what TikTok and Insta are to my kids. He consults the weather app constantly. In Lancaster, it's not uncommon for him to assure me that his app says the weather should be fine for my run while I am standing in an open doorway near him, looking at the rain come down in the street in front of me. His weather app in Lancaster is right more often than it's wrong, but it's wrong more often than my "looking out the window" app is.
Comment 2 on weather watching: Every single day here so far, it's been hot, humid, and either overcast or sunny in the morning. Every single afternoon here, thunderstorms have rolled in with great deluges pelting us. The weather forecasts have been all over the place, from rain all day to sun all day, but the weather itself has been consistently rainless all morning and torrents in the late afternoon. I do not at all trust the weather forecast here; I plan on 2:30-ish p.m. thunderstorms, and that has been a good plan so far.
Because of the weather forecast (not the actual weather), we squashed the Canal visit idea and decided to visit the bus terminal/mall/grocery store instead. The weather was hot and sunny all morning, in fact, but it turns out going to the bus terminal was a good choice anyway, because of the whole needing-a-"tarjeta" thing.
Plan 2a: Visit the bus terminal and get Neil a tarjeta.
We walked the shortcut out to the bus route, where we waited about 20 minutes for the bus. A woman at the stop assured me that Neil could use coins to board, but when the bus finally arrived, Neil tried to pay with coins and couldn't. I, with my tarjeta (bus/metro card) in hand, had already found a seat and stranded him at the entrance to the bus, oblivious to his plight. Another passenger took pity on Neil and used his own tarjeta to allow Neil to board. So nice!
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| The station is large, airy, and beautiful. |
The Albrook Bus terminal is a hub of some importance in Panama City. It's where all the City buses begin or end their routes, a terminal for many of the inter-city buses, and a transfer point to the Panama City metro. It's a hopping place.
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| The sky lights in the bus station. |
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| The station is open to the air at either end and at large archways along either side. |
The first step was to purchase the card itself: it costs $2 in bills, exact change required. Once we got the card, then we fed it back into the machine to charge/recharge it. The attendant was reluctant to take our $20 bill: she reminded me that this machine wouldn't give any change, and I said I understood. She then pointed out this card worked only for city buses and the metro, not for buses to other cities; I said I understood. She then pointed out that a city bus ride is only 25¢, and I explained we're going to be here 9 months. At that point, she was satisfied she wasn't ripping us off, and she took the money so Neil could get his card. Success on Date 2a!
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| A tarjeta: so useful to have! |
Plan 2b: Visit the mall because . . . well, just to know what's there.
The Albrook mall is located just across the bus lanes from the Albrook bus terminal. Both of these buildings are huge, the mall even more so than the bus terminal. I'd been to the mall on Monday to have a look around, to do a tiny bit of wardrobe expansion, and to get some dish rags ("limpiones"). On our "date" day, I was keeping my eye out for rain ponchos, and also thought it would be fun just to let Neil see what a humongous place this was.
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| With a friend on Monday at the lion entrance. |
At one end of the Albrook Mall is a Marriott hotel; a 20-minute walk through the length of the mall takes you to the other end, which is a "Super 99" (groceries plus) store. There are two floors, and both are filled with stores from end to end of the structure. The mall is shaped mostly like a long windy snake with little arms off the sides that have a few additional stores and entrances and exits. To help people keep track of where they came in, these entrances and exits have their own animal designation with their own large statues. We entered by the lion, an entrance just around the corner from the entrance with the giant Tyrannosaurus rex escalator. Other entrances have rhinoceroses, elephants, flamingos, and even a giant King Kong head with a King Kong hand in front of it, where you can pose to make it look like King Kong is holding you up in the air.
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| Exactly the way I usually feel about malls. |
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| The Mall T.Rex escalator is about to swallow me. I'll go up into the stomach, not down into it, though. |
The mall seems to have almost every kind of store you could imagine. It has clothing stores, of course, and home goods and hardware stores; opticians, dentists, pharmacies, jewelry stores… it has a giant carousel, a movie theater, and a bowling alley. The one thing that I had looked for on Monday that I could not find was a bookstore. I'm trying to keep my eyes open for an atlas or even just a large map of Panama. In a souvenir shop, I finally found a small map for about five bucks which I bought, but bookstores and maps apparently not the kind of things los Panameños need in their mall in this era of internet/cell phones.
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| Carousel (and "trains") in the food court. |
Neil and I explored enough of the mall for him to get an idea of it. We also found rain ponchos (adding another $4.26 to the price of our date), and then decided we'd had enough fun. Success on Date 2b!
Plan 2c: Grocery shop together
Figuring out food acquisition in a new place is difficult even when both language and transportation are easy, so it's no surprise I'm trying to figure out the food situation here ASAP.
There's the money aspect, of course. I've learned already that my guy pays zero attention to prices when he buys things (a half gallon of lemonade cost $5? he had no idea. Two tiny packages of cheese cost $11? Oh, really? He hadn't noticed). So although it's convenient to offload chores to him while I'm doing other stuff, I did want to get a handle on the kinds of things we could bring back to our AirBnB without breaking the bank.
There's the wrapped-in-trash aspect also: I'm being a lot more flexible about this than at home, at least early on. I did bring a mesh bag for our veggies and fruit that we could get loose packaged, but I bought plastic-wrapped versions of broccoli, nuts, chicken, and bread. Maybe someday I can figure out alternatives, but for now, I'll do what I can and otherwise accept my limitations.
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| A small part of the Super 99 store; unlike the tiny (and expensive) mini-marts we'd discovered in our first days here, this goes on and on, and has lots of choices. |
There are three big grocery stores near Albrook: the Super 99, a Super Carne, and a Super Mercado Rey. We peeked into the first of these, but ultimately chose the last of these three for our shopping date. My favorite part of the Rey was the sloped moving walkway -- like an escalator without the stairs, easy for people to take their carts on. I'd never seen one before!
We don't have an oven in our AirBnB, just a mini gas stove and a small microwave. We'd previously discovered that precooked rotisserie chickens work really well with our set up, so we nabbed one of these. My inspection of the store confirmed that most everything milk/cheese related is super pricey (for example, a block of creme cheese for $6, yeesh!), so we passed on that. But vegetables and fruits are quite reasonable. I decided to stock up on staples like oatmeal and nuts -- the nuts were, not surprisingly, one of the big ticket items, but I got enough to last quite a while.
A comment on comparing food prices: I know that prices don't always correspond to environmental issues. The $4.26 I spent on those cheap (to me) plastic rain ponchos is an example of how sometimes planetary costs are externalized. But without more information to go on, the costs of food can often be a bit of help in guessing at environmental impacts. Local fruits that come unwrapped cost less than plastic-wrapped imported lettuce, for example. Processed foods, like the cereal my guy likes, cost many times per pound what raw oats or even our cooked chicken do.
And just to get a sense of what it looks like to shop here, here was our haul for the day.
We fit pretty much all of this into two backpacks, and hopped back on the bus (which arrived quickly), and from there back to our AirBnB. Then Neil went riding, because the rain that was supposed to last all day didn't arrive until 5 p.m. Success on Date 2c!
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