Halfway point in Panama

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 in two, bringing the whole book project to 9 chapters.  Also, I've discovered that writing goes a lot more slowly when I'm not all lonely and bored, so now that my husband is back my writing pace has slowed considerably.  

I'd say I'm glad to be not-lonely and not-sad.  Probably that's a good tradeoff for falling a tad behind on the writing schedule (but I feel like future chapters will probably be easier to write, so maybe I'll catch up again? We'll see.)

As for outreach, I've gone a bunch* of one-off workshops, mostly through my host FUNDAPROMAT, but those are likely to be less frequent in the future.  They take a bunch of effort  to organize, for one thing, and also the people that would attend such things probably already have, so there are diminishing returns for that effort.  

[*Just double-checked: 
"a bunch" means 9 workshops, lectures, or radio interviews,
plus participating in 6 FUNDAPROMAT events].

Numerous other Fulbright scholars have talked about how hard it is to make productive professional connections here, and that was certainly my experience at first.  (Typical comments from other Fulbrighters:  "People here don't really know what to do with you." "It was like I didn't exist."  "My host said in advance they could arrange an office for me, but when I showed up they'd forgotten, and said I could use this other person's office on the days they didn't come in."). I myself spent a bunch of time trying to reach out to mathematicians in Panama City, and got either enthusiastic responses that faded into nothingness, or nothingness all the way through.

However, I have a few connections that ought to be a bit more substantial in the next half of my time here.  There's a chance I'll teach a Sunday school class at my church on "the God of Mathematics" -- I did this back in Pennsylvania in 2009, and I really appreciated the interactions. If that works, it'll be fun to reprise this in Spanish! I also will be traveling within Panama to a university I'd visited briefly (UNACHI), doing a longer series of workshops this next time, and then traveling to Chile to meet with mathematicians there.  So those experiences will probably fill a lot of my Outreach Itch.  Should these work out, they'll have been possible largely because of spending a lot of time flailing around during these past 4.5 months.  

Paperwork

Oh, thank goodness, but I think this is all behind me.  Writing the Fulbright proposal was a bunch of work, but I'd expected that work.  Then came the pre-departure paperwork and all the temporary immigration paperwork, and that was a bureaucratic form of a "Tough Mudder" in and of itself!  I think that's all over.  I've documented it as best I can to give the folks coming through after me a sense of how to navigate this path more easily.  Here are the links to those posts, just to keep things in one place.

• The Fulbright Orientation (post to come, probably this Thursday)
• Here's the post about the pre-departure paperwork and all that it involved.
• What I packed
• Here's the post about my post-departure paperwork and my first immigration appointment in Panama.  
• Paperwork done: I'm a documented Immigrant

Language

Before I got here, I thought I was pretty good at speaking Spanish.  When I got here, I realized just how incredibly hard it is to understand Spanish spoken at a normal pace with multiple accents in noisy places.  

I also realized how very, very rusty I was at details like genders of nouns and conjugation of verbs.  I was fortunate to have an officemate who (a) spoke only Spanish and who (b) made it her mission to correct me with compassion.  She corrected me a LOT, so much so that I eventually searched around online and found the Linguno app for the computer. That's helped me a lot with conjugation rules and with irregular verbs.  I do that app daily.

I started taking Spanish lessons when I was 7 or 8, and apparently that was young enough to start picking up accents.  I am constantly having people here remark about how good my Spanish is, even while I beg them to repeat themselves more slowly and I struggle for words or mis-gender my nouns.  I finally realized that my accent is what makes them think of my Spanish as being so good; I can mostly roll my 'r' and pronounce the vowels correctly and such, and that makes me sound like a stronger speaker than my vocabulary and my recognition skills would indicate.  

At the same time, I've definitely gotten better at speaking, and somewhat better at listening.  Certainly, I'm more fearless at both.

Fitness

I miss my running buddies so much.  So, so much.  There's a young dog at my AirBnB who I drag out for runs -- she has lots of energy and could use the outlet, but she also kind of drags behind me.  But she's the most reliable running buddy I've found.

Savvy, my running buddy.

I am very glad I found the "onthego" app before I came here; it allows me not only to see how far I ran, but also to map out new running routes.  

I have also switched over to the paid version of Fitness Blender.  

Of course, rain gets in the way of outdoor exercise, a bit.  The heat and humidity here in Panama make random exercise hard in a way I hadn't expected.  It's not just that it's hard to do a workout because of the 85+ degree temperatures combined with 85+ percent humidity.  It's that minor exercise -- getting up to stretch and go for a walk, for example -- makes you sweat so much your arms stick to any paper you'd be using afterward, or your office clothes get sopping wet, so I often don't move just to try to keep my workspace dry.  When I was closer to the Ciudad del Saber and would occasionally walk the 2 miles there, I'd bring a change of clothes (including change of underwear) so that I could be dry after I arrived.  

Weather

Speaking of weather, we are supposedly heading out of the rainy season into what Panamanians call "summer".  It's been raining fairly constantly the last few days, but the rain has mostly been the steady, almost misty, kinds of rains I'm familiar with from back home, and not the dramatic daily torrential downpours that erupted every afternoon when we first arrived.  (Hah, just as I was working on this post, the afternoon rains started up again!)

Many people have told us that summer is very hot here; that the sun will be devastating.  My airbnb host says that people who visit Panama in February are missing the "good" season (that is, now) when the constant cloud cover keeps things "cool".  Given what I said above about temperatures and exercise, I am stocking up on sunscreen, and might even buy [*shudder*: buying stuff] a light-colored, long-sleeve shirt to protect me from the sun.

Temp, humidity, rainfall, and daylight hours in Panama, by month.

Getting around

I've spent enough time here now that not only can I navigate around myself, but also I've occasionally shown local Panamanians how to find routes or take buses they hadn't known about.  We don't drive here, but I've successfully relocated so that I can walk many places and so that I can take the bus to most other important places I need to go.  I continue to love the bus here, even though waiting for it is like playing the lottery (it might come in 30 seconds or 30 minutes).  At 25¢ a ride, I figure that's a decent price for a lottery ticket, especially one that comes with an eventual bus ride!

New to me (although old-hat to most people, I know) is using Uber; we definitely do a bunch of that.  Also, I rode a boat through the canal and a train across the country, but those were tourism rather than transportation. I took a plane to and from Chiriquí.

When my husband and I go to Chiriquí in February, we're looking into using the long-haul buses (not sure the right terminology -- these are the buses that go between cities as opposed to the Metro buses I ride in Panama City).  On the one hand, they take a lot longer, but they also are significantly cheaper and probably less damaging to the environment. So stay tuned for that!

I haven't biked in Panama. My husband is an avid biker, and he does bike here, but he ranks Panama lowest of all the countries he's been to for bike-ability:  the potholes are constant and ferocious; street hole covers go missing, leaving gaping death traps; there are no shoulders, the drivers are aggressive. 

Not to mention: rain.

Daily Living

I love the AirBnB where I'm staying.  I love the neighborhood, which has many interesting places to explore and is (for Panama) very walkable.  There's a nearby open-air vegetable market. Up the hill we can look out and see the skyscrapers of downtown Panama; in the other direction, we can walk by a river and pasture where we see herons, birds, ñeques, crocodiles, turtles, trees in bloom, and other tropical life.  

The screened-in porch of this AirBnB faces a bird-feeding set up that's incredible and, in the morning, brings in parakeets by the score (40 or 50 at once), azulejos, pechirojos, chachalacas, palomas . . . so many birds.  In the afternoon, I sit out here and blog or work on my book, with the fans blowing on me.  It's warm, but I prefer open air and fans to the air conditioning that comes with many other indoor spaces here. 

Tourism

I'm not usually one of those people who goes in for typical tourist places, but I have been trying push myself to soak up what I can of Panama's nature, technology, and history, and here that involves both nature stuff and also more touristy places, and so I'm expanding my boundaries this way.  So far, I've been to

• Casa Museo in Ciudad del Saber
• Tour de Chocolate
• Bailes Folkloricos
• Parque Omar (walking, seeing trees) (twice)
• Cerro Ancon (hiking)
• Exploratorio museum
• Whale watching
• BioMuseo (twice)
• Bat Night at the STRI in Gamboa (twice)
• Casco Viejo
• Three different Art Galleries
• Museo del Canal
• Sloth Day
• Panama Day parade
• Museo de la Mola
• Parque Metropolitano (hiking)
• Book launch event
• Birdwatching
• Pop-up "Chamanes" archeological exhibit
• Smithsonian Nature Center
• Pedal cars on the Amador Causeway
• Boquete (walk through a park, strawberry restaurant)
• Red Double-decker tour bus
• Purubiakirú (indigenous peoples village) tour
• Canal transit by boat, through the locks
• Panama transit by train

There are still a few things I want to do: 

• re-climb Cerro Ancon with my husband
• hike the Barú volcano in Boquete
• visit the Mira Flores Locks (there's an educational center and imax movie)
• visit Gamboa Rainforest/Lake

So given the relative sizes of those two lists, I don't think I'll have much trouble knocking these last few down.  I don't think I'll leave Panama with a lot of "if only I'd had time to . . . " items left over.  

Summary

I am really appreciating the chance to be in Panama; I've learned so much about this area, about parts of US history that were invisible to me before, about speaking Spanish, about the natural world.  Being away from my usual routine has also of course taught me some important things about myself.

Many people here talk about coming to Panama for a few months that end up turning into decades. Certainly, I can see the allure . . . but at the same time, being here makes me all the more grateful for many of the things I'll get to return to when I get back to Pennsylvania (family, friends, sidewalks, and community yard sales are probably on the top four things, in case you're wondering).  

At the same time, I've been here long enough know that I know there are things about Panama I'll miss when I get back to the States, and so part of the plan for the next 4.5 month is to enjoy the heck out of those things: the incredible nature, the fresh fruit, the fact that my feet are almost never cold, the pride of patria and culture, the daylight hours that don't disappear in December, and the connections I'm making with people here.