Eight month update: Odds and Ends, Here and There

I have been trying to have my blog posts focus on different themes that have caught my attention during my travels, but maybe the theme of the past week or so has been "there isn't a theme".  This is partly because we came back to Panama from two weeks in Chile and brought with us a bug that laid me low.  It's partly because I've now been in Panama 8 (eight!) months, and I've seen so much here already that I'm not running across new-to-me aspects that catch my eye.  And it's partly because I have only one month remaining, and so there's a lot in my head that's thinking about how to best wrap up the Panama experiences and transition my head back into Pennsylvania.  

That's all a preamble to that this post will seem to jump around a bit, because that's what my life has looked like. Also, because my photos don't automatically upload to blogger in the order I ask them to (and because I don't right now feel like wrestling with blogger to get them back into the order I want), what follows will not be chronologically accurate. 

Friends/Tourism 

I've been catching up with friends who I missed while in Chile and while I was sick, and who I'll be leaving behind when I return to the U.S. 

Another Fulbright scholar and I toured the Ciudad del Saber; 
I showed her around a bunch, and she took this photo of me
in front of the FUNDAPROMAT office where I'd been working.
I think she captured the office, my smile, and the sweatiness accurately.

I went out for coffee with a friend who sells vegetables
at a nearby market.  I gave her a bunch of folding puzzles
I'd designed with LaTeX and Tikz; later she sent me this
photo to prove she'd solved the puzzles.  So much fun!

With another friend, we re-visited Casco Viejo.  
I love this street, decorated with hanging hats. 

While in Casco Viejo, I bought a bunch of molas
(amazing stitched designs) as gifts for friends and
family back home. 
This woman, who sold me the molas, made them herself. 
I don't usually like buying things (that's an understatement),
but I feel really good about this particular purchase.

I hung out at a brunch with women from a bible study
I've been attending.  On the table are more mathy 
arts and crafts I brought along for us to do together.

I even hang out with my husband (not quite fitting in the theme,
since I saw him in Chile and will continue to see him in the U.S.).
This is a scene from the second story  of an adorable
nearby pizza pop-up restaurant where we had a rare dinner out.  

Wandering around

I've been out-and-about in the local neighborhood, too.  

This is a close-up (but fuzzy) photo of a parrot.

Zoomed back out a tad.  Do you still see the parrot?
They blend in so well with the leaves that, even though
they're everywhere and I hear parrots all the time,
actual sightings are still rare for me.

I love walking past the amazing trees in the park
downhill from me.

I've been in this pharmacy more times in this past week
than in all the rest of my time in Panama.  
I'm so glad I'm feeling better now!

Math

And of course, there's math. I haven't been doing many talks, for two reasons. One is that in Panama, a lot of times people just don't respond, or they say they're going get in touch but then they don't. I think I have about six different groups of people who told me that they want me to come give a talk sometime, and I said, "Great; I'm here until May 15 -- when do you want me to come?", and then they ghosted me.  The second is that for one of these groups for which I'd originally arranged to come in early April, I had to cancel because of getting sick.

But although I haven't been giving talks, I've been doing a bunch of writing and making figures for my book. What does it look like to write a book?

It looks a lot like drinking coffee.  My colleagues like to say,
"A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems".
This is my favorite coffee mug of late, a gift from my AirBnB host.

It looks a bit like this: sitting on a balcony or a porch
(although often without the rain poring off the roof).
The trees are lush; the birds are often putting on shows for me.

And very specifically, it looks like drawings and words. 
Here are some figures I figured out how to draw using just
Tikz code. I wanted to describe some
simple experiments people can do with their fingers to understand stereoscopy
(that is, using two eyes, instead of just a single camera lens).
That means I had to figure out how to draw a hand and pointing fingers.
This set of figures took me a morning or so of work, 
and I'm pleased with how they came out. 

Spanish

There are no images of me speaking Spanish, except maybe for this cool poster, which announces the one talk I actually have on the calendar between now and when I leave. The people who invited to me wrote to me in English, and after I gave them a title and abstract, they asked if I might be able to do parts of the talk in Spanish, to help draw a bigger audience.  Could I?  Of course I could: I offered to do the whole thing in Spanish, and they jumped at the offer.  I'm really looking forward to this.  

And so that's my a quick glimpse of my life in the weeks leading up to my 8-month anniversary here.  Only 30 days more, and I'll be saying good-bye.