Annalisa en Panamá

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 blogge...

   Forecast:  88°/76° with thundershowers likely;  Humidity : 76% Sunrise  6:09 am.,  Sunset  6:28 p.m. "Medical tourism" is a thing, and there are definitely people who travel out of the U.S. to get medical work done in countries where it's cheaper and no less effective, one would hope. I wasn't really planning to make use of the medical care system here in Panama if I could help it, but at the same time I was pretty curious about what the experience would be like.  So when my time in Chile gifted me with a mild-but-annoying cough and a low-grade fever that lasted a full week, I decided it was time to check it all out after all, for the sake of research.  Oh, and also to try to get better. First visit The "Clinica Albrook" is a 5-minute walk from my house, in a small shopping center (grandly called "Albrook Plaza") across from the vegetable market where I can pick up mangoes for 10¢ each and 30 eggs for $5.  The vegetable market is clea...

I'm working on a chapter on shadows and on stereoscopy. That's keeping my head so deeply engaged that I haven't been out-and-about much in Panama, so I'll just offer two small miscellaneous musings that I'd collected up, plus a picture of a parrot that stared at me on last night's walk.   See the parrot in the middle of the photo? Parrots blend in really well with the leaves of trees, so actually gettin to see one feels pretty special. Words in Panama vs.  Chile vs.  English policia muerte (dead cop) vs.  lomo de toro (hump of the bull) vs.  speed bump ALTO vs. PARE vs.  STOP se alquila vs. se arrienda vs. for rent chévere vs.  bacán vs.  cool, nifty Crosswords and numbers I brought a book of 100 New York Times Sunday Crossword Puzzles with me to Panama, and I was really impressed with myself for how well I was pacing myself (that means, not doing them all at once, but rather saving some for the last months of this trip).  That...

In many of the stores, there's a little sign that says " Pida su factura; evite la multa " ("Ask for your receipt/invoice; avoid the fine".)  I have to admit, I really didn't understand this sign for the first six months I was here. Part of the not understanding is that maybe we don't have the same kind of "factura" back home, a thing that might be best translated as "itemized receipt" or "invoice".  Even when I don't ask for my factura , I get a little receipt-like thing that says that I used my credit card and paid whatever amount on such-and-such-a-day at thus-and-such-location.  The  factura  isn't a standard printout at most places (CVS, take note!), but that little credit-card proof, yes. I think I finally figured out the purpose of that sign this past February.  I was paying for my hotel stay in Penonomé, and the desk clerk asked if I wanted my  factura . Normally, I say no , because I don't really want to...

I don't think I've done a tour (via the blog) that is of the neighborhood I've been living in here in Panama. We used AirBnB, and originally found a place much closer to the Ciudad del Saber, but less than ideal in a few other respects.  That's fairly normal; I booked that first place for three months, using the time as a chance to get to know the area better while looking around for something that might suit us a bit better. Just FYI, "a bit better" in this case means (a) closer to grocery stores, (b) having a bit more light, as the first place we stayed was quite dark, and (c) still on the bus line that I'd found so convenient.  This new place has all that and more.  Our previous neighborhood was a gated community, and so it was very walkable, but also quite homogenous.   The current place has a gazillions of twists and turns; I can get a lot of variety, even on very short walks.  The AirBnB we're staying at is amazing for a bunch of reason, but in t...

One of the things I wanted to learn during my visit to Panama is what it's like to teach in the universities here.  I'm not sure what exactly I wanted to know --- how prepared are the students? what are typical class sizes? how many courses does a person teach? Just, I know that I have certain unexamined assumptions about the way stuff works, and I figured being in an entirely different country might help me re-examine aspects of academia I'd taken for granted. So, when I got to lead a week-long professional development workshop for instructors in David, Chiriquí, --- and when, doing this workshop meant that I ran headlong into busywork and pedagogical buzzwords and bureaucracy --- instead of feeling frustrated, I feel like I'd struck gold.  Here, here was the kind of cultural difference I'd been hoping to uncover, and I waded right into the middle of it up to my knees. Yay! In retrospect, I'm somewhat impressed at how incredibly proficient the administrative le...

USACH In both Panama and also Chile, abbreviations include more than just the first letter of each word, making the abbreviation more pronounceable.  In Panama, I'd spent a week at the Universidad de Chiriquí, called UNACHI; here in Chile, I kicked off my talks at the Universidad de Santiago, Chile, called USACH. In the fortunately/unfortunately genre . . . unfortunately , the department secretary there forgot to send out an announcement about my visit: fortunately , the chair figured out (the day before I arrived, at 10 p.m.) that it needed to get sent out; unfortunately , only 6 people showed up for the talk; fortunately , that gave me a chance to fix the mistakes in Spanish in my slides before I showed it to lots more people.   One delightful thing I discovered at USACH was that their wifi is "eduroam", the same system my home college uses, and so I had zero difficulty logging in.  That was a delightful surprise, as I haven't discovered eduroam anywhere in Panama....