Monthly Archives: January 2017

A Word Problem

I have a quick word problem for you. You invite a group of Panamanian, Venezuelan, Colombian, and Gringo capoeiristas to your house for the weekend of Jan. 27-29 via text around January 5th. All say they are coming and excited. On Jan. 26th, you haven’t heard anything from anyone, so you text asking who is definitely coming and start trying to organize who’s bringing what food and drinks. You hear that Person A is coming on Friday night, Persons B and C are coming on Saturday, and Persons D and E may come pending a health issue. You announce that you will provide breakfasts and dinner on Saturday, and ask they they supply lunch on Saturday.

Question 1: How many people show up on Friday? Who are they?

Question 2: How many people show up on Saturday? Who are they?

Question 3: What time do they show up?

Question 4: How many meals do you have to cook?

 

If you’re keeping score at home, the answers are:

1) zero, no one;

2) 5, Person A, Person B, Person C, and – tricky one here – Persons F and Child Person G!

3) Another tricky one, so here’s a hint. You get a text from Person A at 1:12 pm saying she is waiting for Persons B and C to pick her up to go to the grocery store.  You then get a text from Person B at 1:30 pm saying he is leaving class in the city (an hour and a half away) and going to pick up – not Person A – but Child Person G. At 4:45 pm, you get a text from Person A asking what to buy at the grocery store. There. That’s your hint. The answer? Persons A, B, C, and Child Person G arrive at 6:45 pm. Person F arrives at 9 pm. Obviously.

Oh and also, Persons H and I, plus H’s mom, Person J, stop by for a bit around 2:30 pm. But you probably already knew that.

4) One. If you look at the aforementioned discussion notes about who is bringing what, it would appear that you would be cooking breakfast on Saturday, dinner on Saturday night, and breakfast on Sunday. You’ve asked them to bring lunch on Saturday. Again, these are so obvious…they aren’t going to arrive until after their assigned lunch meal, but being crazy generous, they bring enough meat to feed nearly half of Punta Chame. They also bring every condiment you can imagine, bread, veggies, soda, and a huge cooler full of – wait for it – Balboa Dark beer. I’ll address the dark beer news in a moment. That is huge and deserves its own paragraph.

So yeah. We had a typical weekend with my capoeira friends, which means the following: we had very little idea of who was coming and when, or for how long they were staying, we didn’t know what they were bringing, we didn’t know if kids were coming or not. What we did know is that we would eat and drink a lot and stay up to some ungodly hour of the morning even though everyone is falling asleep in their chairs while music blasts from a bluetooth speaker. And was going to be a lot of fun.

I was so excited to see these people. I hadn’t seen any of them since April after hanging out with them 5x a week for a year, so there may have been some running and jumping and yelling and kisses and hugs when they arrived. You may remember some of them: Árabe (Antonio), Lucero (who is now dating Árabe!), Árabe’s 4 year old son Alejandro, Mahalia, and Moisés.

We cooked about 3 animals worth of meat on the grill on Friday night, then stayed up until 1:30 or 2 eating, dancing, and drinking. Eric even ended up dancing because Lucero (Traquina, if you know her by her Capoeira name) always takes the time to teach and reteach him.

Check out Eric’s face!

These three are so sweet together. Ale, Árabe y Lucero

Lucero is a phenomenal dancer – absolutely amazing to watch. Moisés is also quite good. They’re both characters, so we love watching them dance when they get together. We also enjoyed “un baile típico panameño” from Mahalia and Árabe. It was just awesome. We had seen some folks do this kind of folk dancing before, but never our friends! So cool.

Here’s a video of Lucero and Moisés. I’ve never tried to insert a video before, so y’all will have to let me know if it works for you.

Here’s the Panamanian dance by Mahalia and Árabe, hopefully.

Sunday was pool party time. I’ll just share a few pics here, as this is getting to be a long post. Oh, and we found out what choripan is – basically a chorizo in a hoagie bun with onions, tomatoes, ranch or ketchup, kinda whatever. A latin hot dog. What’s not to like?

 

I also mentioned that we had other visitors on Saturday afternoon. Stella and Elliott, our upstairs neighbors from last year, came by with Stella’s mom after a morning at the beach! It was excellent to reconnect with them. You’ll remember Stella as the model (for a day) that I snuck in to see during Fashion Week in 2015 and Elliott as the neighbor we adopted every time Stella was out of town. They also watched Addie for us a few times.

Speaking of Addie, she’s doing some sightseeing these days. She’s on holiday in Asheville, living it up at the Biltmore House with my parents. Not a bad life. Her birthday is in two days – February 2nd. She’ll be 11 and is still jumping the fence in the backyard. Silly girl.

Kiting, a bulldog, and forgotten coffee

So now for the news you’ve been waiting to hear about: Eric’s kiting! He had his first chance to get out on the water during a lesson with Nino on Thursday afternoon. The plan was for the lesson to be two hours long.

Eric had zero trouble getting back into it. Twenty minutes into the lesson, Nino called me over and said, “I don’t even know what I’m going to tell him to work on. He’s doing great. Great transitions, great control of the kite.” After 30 minutes, Eric came back to shore and Nino basically told him that he should keep practicing on his own and they shouldn’t waste their time continuing with the lesson that day. Yay! I was very proud.

After this success, and knowing that a busy weekend (read: crowded beach) was coming up, we got up the next morning in time for Eric to kite again. The wind was much lighter, as it’s been all season up until we got here apparently, but our hero managed to complete his 2nd and 3rd jumps that day! He was about a foot out of the water on the larger one, and landed both. His goal is to be able to jump and get a little hang time like we see the pros doing out there.

I, meanwhile, decided to walk to the beach to meet him instead of driving with him since it was still, in theory, early enough not to die doing so. It was warm, but also still and quiet. I made the mistake of thinking I could make it in flip-flops – not my best choice after trying out a new brand instead of sticking to the old reliable Rainbows – but it was still nice. It’s only 2 km, so about 4 miles once you convert to our measurement system and adjust for Panamá heat and humidity.

When Eric finished kiting, we sat down on the grass at Machete (the kite place) until this happened:

Eric and Roco, the unofficial Machete mascot.

This dog, Roco, is awesome. He belongs to Itzick, pictured below, who we all know by now owns Machete.

Roco is hilarious to look at because, well, he’s a bulldog. The underbite is amazing, and sometime he can’t quite keep track of where his tongue is supposed to be. Secondly, the poor thing has these mangey looking spots on him where fur is missing. No idea what did that to him. Either way, Eric and I figured he was about 10 years old. Nope. Only 4.

He’ll slowly tromp around the grass at Machete or follow Itzick down to the beach when he gives lessons or goes out to kite. My favorite is when he gets underneath the blue building (pictured above) and just rolls around in the dirt on his back. As Itzick said following once such time, “We could all learn something from Roco.” Indeed, sir. Indeed.

On a down note, we saw two people in those two days of kiting who had been stung by stingrays. The shallow waters get pretty lousy with stingrays during lowtide, so it’s not a beach for swimming. All beginning kiters wear thick rubber boots – just in case they didn’t look silly enough with their helmets and lifejacket and harness – in order to avoid stings. The more advanced kiters go barefoot, but shuffle their feet along through the sand. It’s apparently much better to accidentally kick a ray out of the way than to step on top of one. That’s how you get stung.

Look for the guy sitting down on the steps behind the guy in the white t-shirt. Check out his knee, then look at the pain in his face. Ouch. No good.

We spent Friday afternoon running errands in Coronado in order to get ready for weekend guests. On our way towards town, we passed an overturned car with two guys standing on the side of the road beside it. They looked to be fine and weren’t flagging us down or anything, so we kept going. We realized later that maybe we should’ve stopped just to be sure. More on this in a moment….

We spent made 3 or 4 stops in town, including a cowboy store so I could buy a hat. As a side note, the hat is just a normal sunhat, but for some reason the only place I could find it was in the store called Vaqueritos or “little cowboys.” Awesome.

Anyway, we drove the 45 min back, or almost all the way…then realized we had forgotten to get coffee for Raúl, the caretaker of our house. We had asked him if he needed anything, then completely forgot to get it for him. So, we tucked our tails and turned around, drove 45 min back to town, and got the silly coffee. I guess it was good though because by this time we had decided that I should sew ribbons onto my hat so I could tie it underneath my chin. It wouldn’t last for long in the wind otherwise. So we got ribbon too.

On the way back the second time, emergency vehicles had arrived and were attempting to recover the car. I snapped this photo out of my window. Heartless, I know, but I have to give you guys something to look at!

And as far as we know, the two guys who were in it walked away from it. Amazing. And a good reminder to be careful on these deserted roads.

Coming up next: our weekend with some of my capoeira friends! I have photos of Eric dancing, so stay tuned.

 

 

House Arrest

Friday Night:

I might as well write another post tonight, seeing as how we are trapped in our house for the foreseeable future. There is a wild Panamanian beast outside, and Eric has already fallen victim to her rage. Enough blood has been shed for one night. We have met Satan, and her name is Cat.

Sorry the pic is blurry. I was rushing to shut the door so she didn’t attack me too. Can’t you see the hate in her beady little eyes?

Yep, it’s not all sunshine and paradise down here. We have real problems. Like an outdoor cat. This girl’s got claws, and tonight, she dug them into Eric’s leg. One of the two that he needs for kiteboarding. She broke the skin, y’all. Eric had to use (gulp!) rubbing alcohol to clean it! And you know that stuff stings!

Had I known she was going to do that, I would’ve taken advantage of this situation earlier today:

Anyway, I had to brave the wrath of this little jerk in order to get our laundry done. The problem is that her food is kept in the laundry room, and I kept shooing her out so she wouldn’t get locked in when I left. She wasn’t happy with that arrangement. But after Eric’s little encounter with her, I thought she might be locked in, so I armored my legs with a towel and talked the poor dog into coming with me. Long story short: the cat wasn’t there. Pretty anticlimactic.

By the way, the dog’s name is Anigh. I have no idea how to spell it because a long “I” sound isn’t one you regularly hear in Spanish, but if i use a “Y,” it just ends up looking like Any. It’s pronounced Ah-nigh (as in “the time is nigh”).

The cat is Ron, pronounced with a rolled “r” and, well, a spanish “o” sound. Ron is also spanish for rum. Oddly, she is not much fun when you mix her with orange juice.

Saturday morning update:

We managed to leave the house this morning, but Ron has turned passive aggressive. She took Eric’s chair when he refused to pet her.

***Also, I’ve been made aware that my photos turn sideways when viewed on an iPhone. It’s normal on an Android or on a Mac or PC. No idea why it’s happening or how to change it, so you might just have to turn your heads for now. Sorry!