Annalisa en Panamá

Boquete is a region of Panama in the hills, near a famous mountain/volcano (more on that later), and so the atmosphere here is cooler, breezier, and way less humid than the rest of Panama.  You can see in the vegetation that it's less humid here, too.  Our airbnb is in a region with a sign that says "Jardines de Boquete", which means "Gardens of Boquete". Although this is kind of the extent of the "gardens": nicely manicured playgrounds.  From one point in the neighborhood, we can look down to the Caldera River rushing by. Our first night, we went to a local restaurant for dinner.  I think I have eaten at restaurants more times in this past week than in the past 5 years!  (Maybe I even said that in the previous blog post).  I'm wearing a dress that Aisa from UNACHI gave me as a thank-you gift for my presentations there. She nailed me, I think! I love it. Having been to so many restaurants, the next day for lunch we went to . . . a restaurant!  But ...

I've spent the past week offering "capacitaciones" (professional development workshops) at UNACHI (the Universidad Autónoma de Chiriquí).  There, I spent most of my time inside, but the outside parts are pretty, too, with lovely garden areas. A walkway from the entrance of the school to the math & sciences area has pretty garden areas alongside it. The workshop in action. I taught the class in a computer lab -- mostly, we used pencil and paper, not computers, though -- with a whiteboard instead of a chalkboard.  [ Whiteboards , sigh.  Sometimes life is rough, you know?] It was so, so much fun to be back with other mathematicians talking about math.  I've really missed this.  The group was fun to work with; they had excellent questions, and they did a bunch of work.  By the end, they were saying "you have a family here at UNACHI", and truly, I felt welcomed. The department chair, me, and the guy who organized the workshop. They're holding copies of my...

The last time I came to Chiriquí, I flew.  This time, my husband and I came together. He pointed out that the buses cost only $20, although they take seven hours rather than the one-hour flight. I was surprised he suggested this, because he hates buses (hates, hates, hates). My surprise disappeared when we took that rather uncomfortable minivan trip to Coiba, and my husband immediately backpedaled on the bus-to-Chiriquí idea. Instead, he decided to rent a car, and pointed out that renting a car for two weeks in Panama costs only $57. A friend of mine who lives here, when I mentioned this to her, scoffed ... "but wait until the add-ons".  Sure enough, rental insurance is mandatory in Panama, and that brought the cost to more like $400, which landed us back in the cost-of-flying realm, but has the advantage of letting my husband bring his bike with him. Cows ahead. The drive was supposed to take about six hours, and we were very lucky not to have any significant traffic. Howeve...

Forecast:  97°/76°, sunny Humidity :  74% Sunrise  6:39 am.,  Sunset  6:24 p.m. Well, we've hit the dry season, I guess!  The chance of rain today is down from August's 90% to 73%.  The humidity is down from August's 90% to 74%.  The temperature is up (rising from high 80's to high 90's).  Welcome to summer in Panama! When I first got to Panama, I had a bunch of found-food adventures:  nísperos (loquats), guanábanas, "pipas" (immature coconuts) and platanos.  I'm no longer walking through the bit of a forest that had been my shortcut, and also we have emerged from the middle of the rainy season, and that meant that loquats and guanábanas are gone and I don't visit platanos and coconut trees as regularly.   My AirBnB host has banana and starfruit trees growing in his back yard, so I do get to eat local in that sense, but the closest I've come to "found food" is a tree on our evening walk that has some kind of citrus-y fruit...

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...