Annalisa en Panamá

A couple of people suggested that I visit the Bahá’í Temple here in Panama, and so when an English Language Fellow (another program, like Fulbright, run by the U.S. State Department) expressed interest, I made it a date.  Here's the plan:  We'll meet at the San Isidro Metro station shortly before 11:45 a.m Sunday (April 27), and take the Temple Bus to the temple itself.  For more detail, see https://templo.panamabahai.net/ That site says El Templo Bahá’í is open to all, free, Mon-Sun, 9 to 6.  They offer free transportation from the San Isidro metro to the Temple.  Directions to the bus:  "bájate en la estación de San Isidro y camina unos cuantos pasos, verás un gran portón negro."  That is, "Get off at San Isidro station and walk a few steps, you will see a large black gate." The directions online on how to get there were surprisingly helpful (even listing the times for hopping on the free shuttle from the metro to the temple).  And to my delight...

I've been making excellent progress this week on the next chapter (chapter 6: smoke and mirrors) of my book. I also have been doing almost no exercise this past week. Perhaps these two sentences are not completely unrelated.  As a result, my body has been feeling neglected and somewhat jealous of my brain, and so I decided to give my brain a bit of time off and spend some time with my body, taking it for a 3-mile walk that included heading up a super steep hill with an abandoned radio tower up at the top. Here are some images of the portion of the walk that began at the base of that hill. Just before that hill, a flowering tree that I don't think I've seen in bloom before. A close-up of one of the blooms, fallen on the grass. It's hard to capture just how steep a steep hill is. I tried giving a sense of it by photographing a part that goes around a curve. Holding the camera as vertical as I can. You can see an abandoned building up the top and a Panama tree on the right...

 Forecast:  88°/73° and partly cloudy;  Humidity : 72% Sunrise  6:04 am.,  Sunset  6:28 p.m. Travel is expensive ; at least, that's the standard wisdom. But as a person who'd kind of dedicated to living as frugally as I can without driving my family bonkers, I have admired from afar a couple of early retirement bloggers who praise life on the road as being one of both adventure and also economy. So I was very curious, as we began our Panama adventures at exactly the same time as I began my retirement, what our expenses would look like.   Now that we're nearly done with the trip, I feel like I have a good enough handle on the financial impact that I can make some comparisons.  I think the main summary is this: "short trips are expensive; on the other hand, long trips can be cheaper than not traveling". This has nothing to do with finance; I just love this mural I see on my neighborhood walk. Here are some of the big areas of expenses and my m...

So, here's what I've been doing for the past few weeks.   Looking out the screen at the birds, and typing math.  Even though I'm in Panama, and even though I'll only be here for a little while longer, I've been playing the tourist/sightseer only to the tiniest extent. One small excursion: my husband and I visited the BioMuseo. I love the room full of life-sized sculptures of the animals that crossed the land bridge between the Americas when it first formed. Instead of being out-and-about, I've mostly been sitting on the screened porch in my AirBnB, fans blowing to keep the sweat to a minimum, while I immersed myself in writing.   Panama is amazing, but what's inside my head also captivates me, and getting it out onto paper (or in this case, into electrons and data bits?) has been really absorbing.  Last Saturday, at 5 p.m. -- just before Easter --I finally hit "Save" on Chapter 8.  So my Easter became a true Sabbath, with no book crooning to me lik...

Even though my current AirBnB host doesn't compost, I myself can't bear to add organic material to a landfill [ shudder ] if I can find alternatives.  So I keep a small sealed container in the fridge with our food scraps, and then when I need a break from math writing, I take myself and my food scraps for a walk . . . a walk from which the food scraps never return.  If the food scraps are particularly edible (watermelon rinds count, for example), I'll take them to the nearby pond where the turtles and crocodiles feast on them in a frenzy.  Seeing the water boil over with turtles racing for watermelon or stale bread is amazingly awesome entertainment.    Cuddly crocodiles.  This paired sighting was unusual; they're usually hanging out one-by-one. Other times, I'll wander through the neighborhood and deposit the scraps in a particularly forested area.  On a recent half-mile stroll through the neighborhood, I saw a new-to-me bird.  That's when I real...

My first mango I had my first mango when I was 20 years old or so, while I was visiting a friend of my mother's in Mexico City for a month. Gloria and her children were great hosts, and one of the things they showed me how to do was to make "tortugas" (turtles) from mangoes. I'd never tasted a mango before, and my first reaction was that they tasted a little bit like fruit that had gone too ripe. But with enough exposure, I became a total mango fan. Tortuga.  (Today's mango) More than 30 years pass I didn't eat many mangoes in the United States, especially after I became a convert to various frugality and 'locovore' movements.  Locally grown mangoes, after all, don't occur naturally in south-central Pennsylvania. Before I came to Panama, my fondest mango memories happened when our local soup kitchen got a shipment of them. The mangoes weren't super popular there, largely because the guests have plastic forks and knives, which make it hard to cu...