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...

Three of my kids have joined us in Panama for one week. I'm late late late at writing up a regular blog post, but that's largely because of getting to spend so much time with family. My husband and I came back from Boquete on Monday last week and puttered around, getting ready, and then on Friday, the kids came in. It's been go go go ever since.  Here is just one of our adventures, a long-anticipated trip to Gatun Lake in Gamboa, where we got to visit islands full of monkeys.  It was GREAT! It was super easy travel, and my kids are still raving. We hired an all-in-one guide (they do their booking through a tour website called Viator). The guide picked us up at our front door here in Panama City at 8:30, as promised, took us to Gamboa (detouring back and forth across the Centennial Bridge to get a good view of the San Pedro Miguel Locks) and then to our boat, where we boarded right away.  The boat ride to the islands was about 20 minutes, and then we went from island to i...

We spent our last morning in Boquete walking around the park near the center of the city -- a truly beautiful spot.  Then we did the 7+ hour drive back to Panama City.  I have pictures of the park, but not the drive, so the pictures and words in this post won't match at all. The Caldera River There's one main road between Panama City and David: it's Route 1 (appropriately enough), the Highway of the Americas .  It's two lanes in each direction for most of its length; the speed limits keep varying from 60 to 80 to 100 and back down -- but those are km/hr, not miles per hour.  That's like the speeds on a main highway varying from 35 to 50 to 60 mph.  So it's a slow drive. On the way down, we actually got pulled over for speeding: many people have since told us there is lots and lots of radar gun use. We're fortunate to have been let go with a warning, and my husband fastidiously obeyed the speed limits going forward.  (Another ex-pat told us that when he was ...

 Our visit here in Boquete happened to overlap with a group hike planned by the guy I call "Mr. Adventure".  He'd written, "We'll take a group of blind and super cool people hiking. There will be a Toyota Coaster shuttle departing from Albrook to Boquete and then Cerro Punta. The whole trail takes 4-6 hours, but temperature is between 15 and 22 degrees Celsius." My response? When you guys get to Cerro Punta and start hiking, let me know.  Our tentative plan is when we get the heads up that you’re actually out there, we drive from the AirBnB to the Boquete end of the trail and then get lost in the woods.  [joke: hopefully we do NOT get lost] Or, if not get lost, we find you when you’ve gone a bit more than half way and tell you silly jokes as you finish up your own hike.   So, my husband and I fired up Google Maps and headed up (very much up ) the road toward the Boquete end of the trail, until we reached this sign, and parked. Spoiler alert : this was not a...