Annalisa en Panamá

I arrived in Panama on August 15; I'm scheduled to stay here until May 15.  That means that as the year clicks its odometer over from 2024 to 2025, I'm at the halfway mark in my visit here.  Even if we weren't at the typical calendar time of looking back and looking forward, it seems like this is a good place to stop and take stock of my Panama adventures. So, here are some reflections and hopes, as they apply to my experience to-date on the Isthmus. Professional We'll start with the book I'm writing and with mathematical outreach, since that's the reason the Fulbright folks are supporting me.   I'd planned to write an 8-chapter book (title, "Double Take: then the obligatory long subtitle") on Optical Illusions.  I've written four chapters and started work on a fifth, so it looks a bit like I'm pacing myself well. However, Chapter 4 turned into a huge boggy swamp for me, and I finally got out of the swamp by deciding to split that chapter i...

An electric pencil sharpener:  "un sacapuntas electrico" (why the endings a-as-o ?? Just to confuse me, that's why!!!) In the U.S., we use euphemisms: "I'm going to the restroom", "I'm going to powder my nose".  In Panama, not so much: people here say, "voy a orinar".  It sounds oddly direct and TMI to me. Doors: so many of them here open inward.  That's against fire code in the U.S., and so I'm constantly pulling when I should push and vice versa. Here's a new (to me) joke I can tell in Spanish.  "¿Cual es más sucio: un tornado ó un volcán?  El tornado, por supuesto, por que el volcán lava." [Translation: Which is dirtier: a tornado or a volcano?  The tornado, because the volcano washe s.  The Spanish word for "washes" is "lava".  The joke is not as funny in English.] "Agrader" means "to thank".  "Agradar" means "to please".  I finally figured out that ...

Forecast:  85°/74° with thundershowers possible after 2 p.m..  Humidity :  79% Sunrise  6:17 am.,  Sunset  5:57 p.m. Last week, I got a whatsapp message from a friend here in Panama I think of as "the Adventure Guy" -- he's the same one I hiked in the Parque Metropolitano with.  He asked if I wanted to visit the village of the Purubiakurú, an indigenous group of Embará about an hour or so away from Panama City.  The answer to anything Adventure Guy asks is, as far as I'm concerned, "yes".  So, last Friday we made the hour-long drive to the Chagres National Forest; after that it's a half-hour boat ride upriver in Cayukas (long canoes). (I'm in the orange hat at the far end of the cayuka). There's something really healing and relaxing about being on the water, I think, especially in the midst of such a lush forest. When we showed up, a group of women were singing a welcome dance.   For me, though, what I loved most was hanging out wi...

Forecast:  84°/76° with thundershowers likely to continue for the next several hours.  Humidity :  88% Sunrise  6:29 am.,  Sunset  6:05 p.m. Merry almost-Christmas from Panama!  I know it's very northern-hemisphere-centric of me, but seeing palm trees and banana trees at Christmas time still strikes me as strange---almost as though global warming has taken over even more drastically than anyone might have imagined.  Intellectually, I'm well aware that December means hot weather for more than half of the globe, but I still associate the month with cold weather. Of course, part of the odd juxtaposition is that wearing red fur coats with white fur trim is a symbolism that extends from the cold northern hemisphere into balmy climates worldwide.  As such, Santa has been visiting my AirBnB this past month.  I got to help show him around the house, to see all the fun things he could do here. Santa considers his opening move in the chess game. S...

My husband and I splurged and did a coast-to-coast boat trip on Saturday.  It was an experience I'd looked forward to for a while now, and I'm so glad we got to do it. And this is a recap --- a long recap, I admit --- of the experience. Want to ride along with me?  Read on! 4:15, we wake up and get ready. 5:15 Our uber arrives and drives us to the Amador Causeway. Boats lit up in Panama bay Our own boat, waiting for us 5:45 was the call time we were given.  We arrived on time, along with a bunch of other people.  While other people lined up, we walked through the parking lot, around the restaurant, a bunch of times.  We got to stare out into the bay, seeing boats that we later learned were tuna boats, a BFR (army speak for a Big F Rock).   The sun in Panama rises very quickly: on just one lap of the parking lot, the sky in the distance changed from dark to light. Sun rising on the bay 6:20, we joined the very end of the line to get our wristbands (yell...