Annalisa en Panamá

One morning this past weekend I woke up and walked about 20 minutes along rural Panamanian roads to a nearby beach. The receding water leaves beautiful patterns around the stones and shells in the sand. Many of my friends back home are grading homework, preparing classes, dealing with plagiarism cases, reading and writing committee reports, and fretting about budget cuts.  If I hadn't retired, I could be doing that, too. The guys who walked with me to this beach. Instead, I was doing pushups in the sand with a bunch of really good-looking guys. And sticking my bare toes in the sand, then the warm water, then the sand, then the warm water . . .  When I put it that way, I think I made a good choice here. The beach trip was the brain child of Juan Carlos, the guy I call "Mr. Adventure".  He organized a group of 14 people who crammed into a van in Panama City to drive to the beach-side town of Santa Catalina, about 230 miles away.  The view from the Bridge of the America...

A friend asked me, "How big is Panama compared to the U.S. States? Is there anything of comparable size?   I hadn't thought about this before, and so decided to do a couple of other comparisons, but all with my home state.  Here goes: Panama is wider and higher than Pennsylvania, but smaller in other dimensions. Panama Pennsylvania Population 4.468 million 12.96 million Total area 75,420 sq km 119,282 sq km Land area 74,340 sq km 116,074 sq km Water area 1,080 sq km 3,208 sq km Width 480 mi 283 mi Length 37 to 110 miles 170 mi Highest point 11,401 ft 3,213 ft Land boundaries 555 km (Colombia & Costa Rica) ?? (Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia, Ohio, New York, New Jersey, Ontario) Coastline: 2,490 km 140 km (along Lake Erie) Official language Spanish None Cost of living: Pennsylvania is 2.1 times more expensive than Panama overall. (says https://www.mylifeelsewhere.com/cost-of-living/panama/pennsylvania-usa ) Highest point: The lofty Cordillera de Talamanca extends eas...

A while back (in this post ), I described the rather amazing campus of the Ciudad del Saber (City of Knowledge): amazing both for what it is today, but also for its interesting history.  That post showed mostly the outside of buildings on the campus; here's a bit of an inside tour. Here's the parking-lot entrance to the building that houses the FUNDAPROMAT headquarters. This is the building where my host's office space is.  The building includes offices for a number of different organizations,  including FUNDAPROMAT, Wetlands Preservation, and others. Guests have to be buzzed in; below is the desk that does the buzzing.  It's on the side of the building that has the parking lot, even though the buildings were designed to have their "main" entrance opposite, on the side that overlooks the park.  We bow to the reality that most people aren't pedestrians. The desk has the very cool Ciudad del Saber logo behind it. I like this double swirl! There have been th...

Forecast:  88°/74°, lots of sun and then partly cloudy Humidity :  70% Sunrise  6:38 am.,  Sunset  6:18 p.m. The picture below was the fence that made me realize I ought to have a post just about posts . . . fence posts , to be more specific.  Fences here are definitely not a "safety first" feature of life! A pointy addition to the top of a standard chain-link fence. Not "pretend" pointy, but "for real" pointy.  Fleur de lis are common; sometimes they're painted different colors than the rest of the fence, sometimes not. Another pointy addition, this time atop a concrete wall. Notice that there are three kinds of points: star-shaped ones and short triangles forward, and tall triangles pointing backward.  Ouch ouch ouch. No points on top.  This place is for sale! (That's what "se vende" means) This fancy place has razor-wire coils on top of their fence. A close-up: it's not barbed wire, it's really razors.  Yeesh! Not every fence ...