Hospital Tour and Missing Bank

On Wednesday, 1/14, or 14/1 as these crazy folks like to say, we had a tour of the fanciest hospital in town, Hospital Punta Pacifica.  It’s affiliated with Johns Hopkins and is up in the part of town that I described in the last post with all the fancy condos.  It was interesting.  Half of the hospital was what you would think of as a normal hospital, and the other half was a one stop shop for all of your other doctors’ offices.  Pretty good idea, actually.  You can find a primary care doctor, an optometrist, a neurologist, and a psychiatrist all on the same hall.  Not bad.

Right in the center though, was a row of kiosks with representatives from various medical insurance companies hawking their plans.  Very strange.

So the tour was interesting to me in that our guide took us ALL over the hospital.  Want to see the intensive care unit?  Let’s just walk right in.  Emergency room?  Hey, this guy looks like he’s in pain!  The room where they resuscitate people (do we have a word for this in English?  I couldn’t come up with one.  It’s like a room full of crash cart stuff.)?  Sure…come on in.  No warning not to touch stuff…no problem.  Eek.

Eric walked out thinking it was exactly like an American hospital, only not crowded.  There were empty beds, no one was in a rush, there didn’t seem to be a lot of people waiting in the ER.  Some of the accommodations were nice.  You could have your own suite if you wanted to pay $400/night with an extra room with couches for your family members.  I think I just still have this idea stuck in my head that American medicine is best and nothing else can measure up.  Very Ameri-centric thinking, I guess you’d say?  Something akin to racism, but maybe more like nationalism…only not in the real meaning of the word.  Anyway, I’m not to the point of saying that I’d be perfectly comfortable sending a friend’s baby with a congenital heart defect to Punta Pacífica rather than to my sister, but maybe I’m more biased than most.

After the hospital tour, we set out on what should have been a 16 minute walk (in 95 degree heat) to, not the mall right next to the hospital, but the other mall right next to the other hospital.  There was supposed to be a bank in that mall, and I was going to try my hand at getting us a bank account.  Or I was at least going to see if they were willing to deal with Americans.  I’ve been really nervous about this because it seems a little important.  Apparently we need to have access to money down here in order to get by.  Long story short, the walk did not take 16 minutes, my delicate self had to stop for an emergency limón sorbet in the middle of the trek so I wouldn’t fall out, there was no bank, and we decided to call it and walk home.  Why we walked home, I can’t remember.  Here’s a picture from the walk:

I don’t know why we were smiling because we hadn’t accomplished anything and it was miserable.  When we got home, we crushed a few glasses of water, then closed ourselves in Eric’s office/the guest room, turned on the a/c in there, and I fell asleep for a few hours out of pure exhaustion from the heat.

Apartment Hunting

Yesterday we checked out an apartment in a fancy building about 5 blocks down towards the old city.  I was excited about this one because it’s a newer building, it’s in the part of town where we want to be, and Eric was actually going to get to come with me to see it.  So you can imagine how excited he was when we walked into the lobby and saw this:

I thought it was awesome.  Completely over the top and ridiculous, but really?  How often do you get to live in a place like this?  And it’s just the lobby.  It’s not like this is your living room.  I love it.

The building was fancy – 65 floors, 3 or 4 years old, 3 “social areas,” a gym, an indoor lap pool, a sauna – b/c who doesn’t want to go sit in a hot room after spending a day outside in Panama? – a turkish bath, 2 pools, one of which is just for adults and is on the top floor:

Here’s the view from the top of the building.  I can never quite get the panoramic photos to turn out right using my phone, but you get the idea.

 

So everything was great…except for the apartment.  Lovely, but there were no windows in either bedroom.  The guest bedroom was tiny and you’d have to use the a/c all the time.  And that’s just not an option when full time a/c would cost $800/month.  The master had a door to the balcony, but not a window that you could just leave open all the time.  In a weird way, we’re getting spoiled in our little old apartment here because there are wonderful cross-breezes.  We’re not going to get that in a giant building.  Anyway, we passed on that apartment.

Bichos and Dinner with New Friends

Last night, right before we left for dinner, I was sitting on our bed looking for jobs online.  We have been trying to figure out how this whole thing works.  You have your windows open in the evenings for the breeze because you don’t want to have to pay for a/c yet, but you don’t want to turn on the lights because that would attract bugs.  For the first several nights, we sat mostly in the dark and only turned on lights for brief moments when we had to.  From our window, it looks like most of the other apartments are dark early too.  Is this just what people do?  It seems silly.

Anyway, I had the light from my computer last night, so I was fine.  I saw a bug fly at my computer, and figured that was to be expected.  Then a few moments later, I saw another.  Then one crawled on my hand.  Then one seemed to crawl under my screen and down between the screen and the keyboard.  I started to wonder how many of these things there were.  I turned on the light and these things were EVERYWHERE.  All over my computer, possibly crawling inside it, all over our bed, on the pillows, on the sheets, on the bedspread, on the floor.  Eric called them ants at first, but they would fly in, land, immediately lose their wings, then start crawling along like tiny inch worms.  Disgusting.  Still have no idea what they were.  We managed to shake out the sheets and kill the ones on the floor and grab a bunch in Kleenexes off the pillows and bedspread.  I shook the pillows out the window a few times…a bit obsessively because, you know, there were tiny flying worms in my bed.

And then we were just supposed to go to dinner.  So we did.  Because…Panama.  I did, however, take a minute to email the owner of the apartment to say, hey, this happened and it was gross…is it normal?  What are they?  How do you kill them?  Will this happen again?  I don’t know what I expect her to do about it, but I like to tell her when something is disgusting here, and I think that counts.

So anyway, after the flying worm invasion, we met up with the missionary couple from South Carolina, Michael and Tricia, that we met at church on Sunday.  You know, the ONLY other people who were there besides the pastor and his wife?  They invited us to dinner, so we met them in El Cangrejo on a happenin’ street called Via Argentina.  That is the place to be on a Friday or Saturday night.  Or a Thursday, apparently.  It’s pretty much all bars and restaurants, and a ton of people were out last night.  We picked a place that had all kinds of food, and we found out that it’s open 24 hours a day.  Excellent.

We had heard that Panamanians aren’t fantastic at customer service, and this was our first good example of that.  Our waitress was completely annoyed with the idea of having to, well, do her job.  She rolled her eyes when my menu was slightly in the way of her putting my drink down, she refused to try to understand my spanish, even when I was just saying “Sí” to agree with what she was saying, and she never smiled.  The best part was that when she handed Eric the bill at the end of the meal, SHE had already written in the tip for herself!  It’s not like it was a standard printed 10% or whatever.  She had decided that we were going to give her a certain amount.  Is that a thing?  Can you even do that?!  Well, she did.

We had a great time with Michael and Tricia Lee though.  We heard the story of how they got into missionary work, about their kids and two one year-old grandkids, as well as their one year in Costa Rica for language school and 3 years in Mexico.  And it turns out, my Aunt Angela in Georgia is friends with a lady who is “VERY good friends” with the Lees.  Small world.

After dinner we walked down the street to La Rana Dorada, the Golden Frog, and tried out their craft beers.  We talked for another hour or so, then headed towards metro, just in time to find out that it closes at 10.  We could’ve walked home, but it would’ve taken a while and it was the witching hour for the huecos de muerte, so we cabbed it home.

Today I really need to make it to a bank, if they’ll stop hiding from me, and then I’m going to see another apartment.  I found one online, then right after I made an appointment to see it, the realtor that I’ve been working with sent me pictures of the exact same apartment.  Oops.  I felt like I was cheating on her.  I tried the whole just tell the truth thing, and she insisted that I cancel with the other lady and let her make an appointment.  That’s what I did, but now I’m regretting it.  It’s just that the original realtor has done so much for me already…I guess that’s how they get you.  Oh well.  Guess I burned my first Panamanian bridge.  This is the first apartment in the building that I’ve really been wanting to see, so I’m excited.

Oh, and in case anyone is wondering about our doggies, they’re doing just fine.  In fact, I think they are enjoying “camp” more than they like being with us.

I’ll leave you with a couple of pics of our apartment.  One of our living room and one of Eric’s office/our guest room.  Only a couple more weeks before we’ll have our first guest!