When Panama Gives You Lemons

Living overseas can be rough, but one learns to adapt.

We heard about a new stand up paddle board club not far from the city. It was a near a place called Playa Bonita, a beach distinguished by the immense amount of plastic wrappers and beer cans found on the shore. While the irony of a beach so named permanently resembling the aftermath of a frat party once struck me as profound, really it's a sad analog for much of Panama. A beautiful country drowning in trash.

Today was a fortuitous day though. There was nice breeze blowing, but the seas were calm. Only a few beer cans could be seen, and the ocean was nearly plastic of trash. My fiancé and I paddled happily around the bay, sometimes with our Panamanian puppy on the back of the board.

A few hours later, we loaded up to head home. Almost immediately I heard the thump thump thump. Flat tire. My car has been the bane of my existence here. I paid too much for it, it has no airbags, it breaks down constantly. It's an evil blue avatar of everything difficult in Panama, the embodiment of the tropical struggle.

The side of the road where I pulled off was slanted, the ground uneven and grassy. I jacked the car up as far as I could, while drivers roared by honking as they're oft wont to do. Then the jack slipped on the uneven surface and lodged itself like Excalibur between my car and the ground. As I threw my hands up in frustration, I saw my lovely finance had taken out a beach chair, and was sitting on the side of the road as if she were on the white sands of the Caribbean.

So I joined her. If you can't change the way things are, you might as well be comfortable.

A nice sunny day.

We sat, drivers honking, as the nice breeze blew over us and kept the mosquitos at bay. I called our road side assistance, and a nice lady assured me someone would be out in five minutes. An hour later a car rolled up, and two men eagerly helped me tighten the last lug nuts. Once I figured they won't coming any time soon I had freed the jack with a number of ferocious kicks.

When Panama gives you lemons, make lemonade.

Panama So Far

A year and a half in and Panama still manages to bemuse, frustrate, confound and entertain me.

We started year two by moving to Casco Viejo, the one historic neighborhood left in the city that is gentrifying at light speed. We got a beautiful old colonial apartment building a stone's throw from the president's palace.

In Casco you find Porches and poverty in equal measure. Next to remodeled colonial buildings that charge $3,000 in rent, you find old tenements filled with squatters. Restaurants serving $10 cocktails are adjacent to families selling Panamanian staples for $3.50. It pretty much exemplifies Panama. All the recent money and investment paints a first world sheen over a still developing country.

Case in point, in our beautiful colonial apartment (not remodeled and not paying $3,000 a month), the water stopped working, sometimes for days at a time. If I showed you pictures of the place, the interior pillars and french doors, you'd be jealous. If I showed you pictures of the day I had to speak to audience of hundreds without showering, you'd probably laugh.

We moved out in a hurry, and have since used Airbnb to stay in two of Panama City's nicer neighborhoods. The juxtapositions are odd. Porches swerve to miss enormous pot holes and missing man covers. Immaculately manicured lawns lay next to the ubiquitous Panamanian litter.

This morning I saw a woman, decked out in fancy biking gear, riding a thousand dollar mountain bike, doing figure 8's in a park, weaving around styrofoam containers. All dressed up and nowhere to go.

No doubt this country is booming. Venezuelans and Cubans are flocking here in droves, while Americans and Canadians keep heading south. Construction is everywhere, malls are everywhere, glittering skyscrapers dot the landscape and mar the Pacific coastline for miles 60 plus miles to west. 

I just don't know that it's that good for Panama. Rent in the city is skyrocketing. Every inch of beach is being developed and bought up by foreigners. Huge infrastructure problems with water and waste collection still exist. Panama Bay literally smells like a sewer. But still, towers go up, developers get rich, and foreigners come in droves.

I went to a beach last weekend, passed the gated communities, the giant piles of trash those same communities dump on the side of the road, passed the mansions and the villas, before arriving at a nice little beach where a Panamanian woman charged me $5 to park. I pay that gladly. That's her slice of the action. The rest of it seems to be going to everyone else. 

7 Benefits of Finally Learning to Cook for Myself (at 31)

My life has reached a tipping point.

I officially like the food I cook more than I like eating out, almost anywhere.

Today, in about 15 minutes, my girlfriend and I whipped up some rice bowls. We added lentils, sauteed veggies, crunched up tortilla chips, and some homemade habanero sauce. To not make it too healthy, we piled lots of cheddar cheese on top. 

Delicious. Cheap. Healthy. 

I like my food in that order. Delicious. Cheap. Healthy.

I don't want to get too preachy about food. I'm not a vegetarian, and though I dabbled in the Portland foodie scene a little, the Junior Bacon Cheeseburger from Wendy's remains my favorite meal of all time. I'm just happy I can cook edible food. It wasn't that long ago that all I really knew how to do was make spaghetti or overcook a steak. 

So what are the benefits of finally being to cook well? They are many:

1. I'm eating better tasting food.
   I'm kicking myself for all the times I've paid $8 for some reheated chicken wings, or a quesadilla. Even at the fancier places I'm not blown away. It's rare I don't walk away thinking, "I could have done better."
   We pay a lot of money for inferior, reheated, really-not-that-good food. I guess they do our dishes too, so that's nice. But you can do better. Just saute some peppers and onions and through them on anything, rice, a burger... you name it. And it will be better than what you get at 90% of restaurants.
2. I'm saving a ton of money.
   Here in Panama, if we sit down, its going to cost my girlfriend and I at least $30. Then I feel stupid because that bowl I mentioned above probably cost $2.00 total (veggies in particular are very cheap here), and tastes 10x better. We are saving hundreds a month by eating out less.
3. I'm eating way healthier.
   More cooking means less fast food. On top of that, I find I'm eating less meat and way more veggies not because of some diet, but because I like the taste.
4. I have way more energy. 
   Since I started cooking more, I find I'm drinking way less coffee. Even on days I don't get a lot of rest or don't exercise in the morning, my usual energizers, I'm not dragging. I guess what we put in our bodies really does matter.
5. It's a great way to score boyfriend points. 
   Nothing earns more me love and respect from my girlfriend than cooking for her, unless I do the dishes too.
6. I learned that yogurt is everything.
   Seriously. Yogurt. Did you know that natural yogurt is pretty much sour cream? I love sour cream. Want to make an awesome sauce? Take "x" ingredient, and blend it with yogurt. Bam. Now you are winning Chopped.
7. I watch a lot of the Food Network.
   Guy Feiri haunts my dreams. I love Chopped in particular though, what those people whip up in 30 minutes blows my mind. Some day. 

Those dishes are the downside, especially since we don't have a dishwasher here. But that's it. It took me 31 years, but I finally learned how to cook! 

Mailing a Post Card in Panama

I promised about 100 kids that I would write them a post card from Panama. I wasn't expecting 100 of my students to put their addresses down. More like 10. I've offered before to write post cards whenever I took some trip overseas during the summer, and usually about 5 kids took me up on it. Since I was leaving for two years I expected a few more. But not 100.

So I bought 10 post cards and wrote the first batch to my 8th graders who graduated last year. These are kids who I had taught for 4 years, and who moved on from Butte Creek the same time I did. I felt a closer bond with than I had any other class, it felt right that they should receive the first of my 100 post card salvo from Panama. 

Then I came to discover that Panama has no national post office. There are no mail boxes, no mail men, nothing. Private businesses fill that void a bit, like Fed Ex for example, but they mostly cater towards businesses. After asking around in my neighborhood, a number of kindly strangers who could put up with my bad Spanish directed me to a store called "Mail Boxes."  Perfect.

Arriving at Mail Boxes yesterday, I pulled out a post card and asked how much it would cost to send one to the west coast. I was hoping for under a dollar, would have been OK with $1.50, and really hoped it wasn't more than $2.00 a post card.

The lady looked at it, smiled, and grabbed some laminated chart and a calculator and began pounding away furiously. For over a minute she was calculating, chk chk chk on the calculator, before pertly popping her head up and proclaiming "$46.47." I of course asked her to repeat it, and after confirming a second time, I did some calculating myself, and decided I sadly will not be mailing 100 post cards at the cost of $4,647 dollars.

Panama is like that. It seems so similar to home at times with its skyscrapers and glittering malls and ubiquitous American chain stores, but try to mail a post card and bam! Panama-ed.

Eating Local in Panama

Panama has enormous crabs.

Eating local has always been something I've aspired too. The connection between people and the earth is ancient, delicious, and increasingly disappearing. Globalization has brought Idahoan dried potatoes and Rogue Brewery beer all the way to Panama. In supermarkets here you're more likely to find foreign produce than local.

Still, Rebekka and I have found two places that are as local as it gets. The first is the Mercado de Mariscos, or simply, the "Fish Market." A nondescript building holds about 40 stalls selling the day's catch. It smells like hell, and couldn't be fresher.

Most everything you can imagine is here. Squid, little octopus, clams and all kinds of fish. Our first visit we played it safe and snagged some blue fin tuna. You pay by the pound and they'll fillet it for you right then and there. It cost $16 and we ended up with enough tuna for eight meals.

Ebenezer proudly posed for our pictures.

The crab stall.

Our next visit we opted for red snapper and the most enormous crab I've ever seen. This crab proved to be a mistake, shelling these guys is nothing like shelling a Dungeness from Oregon. He was armored like a tank, and it took me about an hour to get all the meat out.

Rebekka leading the crab in some stretches.

Last weekend we also visited the local farmers market, known as the Mercado de Abastos. It's located in a weird warehouse in the middle of the city. And it smells like death. A giant garbage dump filled with rotting vegetables and who-knows-what else greeted us at the entrance.

The place is huge. People drive through, stopping at stalls that interest them. Most of the vendors are there to sell to restaurants or even grocery stories. Enormous bundles of bannanas, pallets of pineapple and cartons of coconuts are for sale, cheap. But you can purchase in smaller quantities. We bought:

• One pineapple for 75 cents
• Four potatoes for 60 cents
• A bundle of celery for $2.00
• Four coconuts for $2.00
• Two mangoes for $1.00
• A pound of tamarillos for 85 cents
• 15 mamon chinos (lychees) for 50 cents

A bundle of produce for $7.70. And I'm pretty sure we overpaid for all of it.

You would never guess there is something delicious hiding in here.

It's all been delicious, healthy, and as about as cheap as you can get in this relatively cheap country. 

Driving in Panama

Panama City is a noisy, busy place. Traffic, construction, and music blaring out of cars at ear-splitting decibel levels. Cars and drivers here deserve particular note.

• Cars merge in a way that is almost sensual, like Latin lovers dancing salsa. There is NO space between cars. Where the American driver sees clearly that there is no space to merge, the Panamanian just sticks his nose out in front of you, forcing you to stop, and in he goes.
  
  If you try to be courteous and stop to let someone into traffic, you will often cause more harm than good. The driver you are trying to help, confused by your behavior and possibly sensing a trap, will not budge until you've both stared at each other for awhile. He will then rapidly enter traffic once you give up in frustration and try to move on.
  
  
• This, and all other driving, is accomplished with much honking. You honk when you pass. You honk when you see someone on the side of the road. You honk if you are in traffic so bad the street is a parking lot.
  
  Two honks seems to be the standard greeting. One long, unbroken honk generally signals frustration. I've taken gladly to this habit, and try to greet every honk I hear with two friendly honks of my own.
  
  
• If you see someone with their hazard lights on, they are telling you they are about to do something crazy. Like pass on the shoulder or weave in and out of traffic.
  
  
• Windows here are tinted to a crazy degree. Like many cars here, my CRV came with near black windows. I do not exaggerate in saying I can barely make out headlights from the driver and passenger window at night time. As a result, I drive at night with my windows down.
  
  The scary thing is, I'm the only person I've seen driving with my windows down at night, and some windows are even more tinted than mine.

Despite all this, I've managed to manage. I even drove across the continent to the Caribbean side this Saturday (takes about an hour) without incident. Still, driving here is intense.