Category Archives: Month Two

The Yaris’s Debute

Big news.  Yesterday, we DROVE to the grocery store.  Yep, you heard me correctly.  We drove.  We gave not a single thought to how many liquids we put in our cart or how awkward something might be to carry back to the apartment because all we had to do was put it in the trunk and DRIVE back to the apartment!  We’re so fancy!  Amazing.  I even bought extras of things that we’re not going to use in the next two days.  It may be 5 days until I use some of the things that we bought!  Can’t tell you how exciting this is.

After that, it got even more exciting.  We strayed even further from the apartment.  We went all the way to the furthest island along the Amador Causeway, which is circled in red.  Our apartment is circled in green.  Our approximate route (on the way there, at least…I think…sorta) is in blue.

Our trip to Alberto's - an Italian restaurant on Isla Flamenco.

Our trip to Alberto’s – an Italian restaurant on Isla Flamenco.

For the record, yours truly drove.  It took about 35-40 minutes to get out there (one wrong turn and some traffic b/c of a big concert at the convention center) and 26 minutes to get back.  Silly for a 7 or 9 km drive.  But whatever.  I learned, first, that our tinted windows are heavily tinted.  I always thought that meant that it was hard for people to see in.  Um, evidently it makes it hard to see out too.  Especially when it’s already dark outside.  Tricky.

Eric was a patient and helpful navigator, even though I’m sure he had to be very nervous.  We didn’t know the roads, it was our first big outing with these crazy drivers, I was nervous, the tinted windows were driving me crazy, the streetlights aren’t great everywhere, the lane lines aren’t clearly marked in most places, and everyone seemed to know where they were going except us.  But we did it.  We conquered driving in Panamá.  It can be done.  I think it was important for me to do it first, for me not to relegate that responsibility to Eric immediately.  And even though he rolled his eyes a bit as he did it, he took a picture of his proud wife after I got us to the restaurant in one piece.

A Panamanian Driver!

We knew about this restaurant from our trip here last year; it was where we ate with the UNC alumna that I emailed out of the [Carolina] blue.  We walked along the waterfront for a moment, saw incredible yachts like this one:

That's a yacht of boat!

then had a nice meal in the open air, complete with Julie-approved people watching.  The star of the evening was this amazing get-up:

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Yes, folks, it’s a lacey black onesie of some sort.  I gotta say, the woman had confidence.  Panamanian women work what they’ve got with pride, and I like it.  The confidence, that is, not the onesie.  Don’t be crazy.

We took a different route home which took us through “an area,” as Eric put it.  I called it “the ghetto.”  Eric told me not to stop for anything, although I had trouble with that strong suggestion, as cars kept stopping ahead of me.  I asked him what he expected me to do and he responded “Ram them!”  I declined to do so, partially for fear of causing a gang riot of some sort.

He pulled up a map today and showed me that we were on the edge of Curundú, a place we never wanted to go.  The other side of the street, however, was no better.  Just another neighborhood that we had heard was no good.  It was really pretty scary when we took that turn between the two neighborhoods.  There were tons of people out, most actually in the street that we were driving along.  I don’t know exactly what I was afraid of, but I knew that I just wanted to get home.  Quickly.

We made it, and thanks to my parents, Apple TV, and some kind of crazy rig that my dad set up through FaceTime, I had a perfect seat for the UNC/Dook game.  I enjoyed some of it.  Winslow is dirty and kung-fu has no place in basketball.  Go Heels.  We’ll leave it at that.

My day ended with receiving photos of my sweet Laine on her first trip to Disney World.  She looks like she’s in heaven!  Can’t wait to hear all about it!

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Thus ends our second month in Panamá!  Come see us – time is flying by!

A what? A Yaris? I’ve never even heard of that!

Yep!  We did it!  We bought a car!  In Panama.  Who’d’ve thunk?  On Tuesday I was saying that I didn’t know if we really even needed one.  By Tuesday night we were doing research on the Central American version of Craigslist (www.encuentra24.com).  By Wednesday at noon, we strolled downstairs to test drive this cute little Toyota Yaris.  Yes, Eric was brave enough to go out on the main street in front of our apartment in someone else’s car on his first attempt at driving in Panama traffic!  When we got back, we talked the guy down about $700 from what really was a pretty fair price to start with (fingers crossed that the engine doesn’t fall out of the car as I type this) compared to other Yarises from the same year and with similar mileage, shook hands, and agreed to make it happen!  Mind you, all of this was done in Spanish.

We went to our bank almost immediately to see if we could go ahead and get the car insurance policy set up and ready to go whenever we got the paperwork done.  Turns out, on this visit to the bank we were greeted by the woman who helped us to open our account with kisses and hugs, then we were ushered to the front of the line!  She gave us the debit card we’d been waiting on, then took us directly to the woman who handles car insurance.  After about 20-30 minutes with this other lovely woman, we were all set!  All we had to do was email her copies of scanned documents when the deal was done.  AMAZING!  How was that so easy!?

I’ll try to pare (pair?  pear?) down the details of the actual car/money transfer a bit, but when we left the seller, Alberto, that first day after seeing the car, we understood that the plan was to wire money directly into his account after all the paperwork was done and the car was officially mine.  I say mine rather than ours b/c Panama insurance companies give female drivers a 50% lower deductible than male drivers.  Easy decision as to whose name it was going into.  I wonder if all the crazy male taxi drivers screw up the stats or if women are just more cautious or what.  Either way, nice perk.

Turns out, Alberto thought the plan was for us to get a “cheque de gerencia,” a cashiers check, from a particular bank.  Of course, this made more sense b/c we could directly exchange the check for the paperwork, but we had already discussed doing it the other way.   Anyway, after a bunch of miscommunications and a lot of weirdness from someone who seemed in person to be a normal guy, we figured out the process.  For example, we had originally decided to meet on Thursday at noon to do the paperwork at the Municipio (municipal building, i guess, is the translation), but once he said he wanted the check instead of the transfer, we told him that we didn’t know how long it would take our Panamanian bank to actually acknowledge the transfer.  “But I thought wire transfers happened instantaneously?!”  I know.  But remember…Panama.

Anyway, after Bank of America called Eric and he confirmed that yes, he did in fact want a bunch of money sent to a random country for the first time ever, they sent it and our Panamanian bank received it immediately.  Amazing.  We got the check pretty quickly and were able to meet Alberto at 2:30 pm.  When I texted him to tell him we could be there at 2:30, he told me he had been there all day.  I apologized, asked if I had led him to believe that we would still be there at noon, but he said no, it wasn’t a problem, he lived very nearby and it just made sense.  I’m not sure how, but that’s what he said.  Um…okay.

That same afternoon, however, the owner of our apartment, Isabel, who I may have described to you as the Panamanian version of a 60-something lady from Buckhead in Atlanta or maybe Savannah or Charleston, but who Marianela, our Spanish teacher, simply refers to as “un Judeo,” – a Jew – was having some guys bring over a new dining room table for us.  Turns out this thing is a monstrosity.  It took four big guys to carry the glass tabletop, so Eric had to stay here to let them in rather than them just leaving it in the hall for us to bring in.  He later said that he had a pretty good conversation with one of the guys – in Spanish!  I’m so proud of his progress, even though he doesn’t see it.

The table.

The table.

The guys with the table.

The guys with the table.

That meant that I was on my own to go ensure that all the proper paperwork was done on a rather large purchase in a confusing government building in a foreign country where I know some of the language but where they speak VERY quickly and where the government workers love to mumble.  Jerks.

We had to go to two offices.  One gave you a piece of paper saying that you were transferring the car from one person to the other and the other printed a piece of paper saying that the car is now in the new owner’s name.  Kinda silly, but hey, that’s government everywhere.  We only made it to one office before the other closed.  No worries though, Alberto and his son (one of the few really good-looking folks I’ve seen since we got here, honestly) assured me that the important part had been done, that I officially owned the car, and that we’d come back the next day to finish up.  He handed me the keys, I handed him the check, and I got into my new (used) car!!!

It had been Eric’s plan to meet me once the table guys had left, but I finished up first, so that meant that I was going to have to drive home.  I was actually pretty excited.  I didn’t have to go too far.  I could actually see my building from the Municipio and vice versa, but I didn’t know exactly which streets were one way, how to get into our garage, or which parking spot was ours.  But I made it!  Completely without incident (incidence?).  Here’s my shot of my first drive.  Mom, stop it…I was at a red light and I didn’t even look when I hit the shutter button on my phone.  🙂

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I got it home safely and promptly took photos of it.  I wanted to wait to post this until we took it out in the sun so I could take better pictures, but I can’t wait.  It’s a big step for us down here.

The spedometer is only in km and is in the middle of the dash. Very strange.
Alberto insisted it was “celestre” or sky blue when I called it “azul” or just blue. I think he’s mistaken. It’s blue. I like it though.
The fancy remote that promptly stopped working today. Eric’s been trying to fix it for the past hour.
From the front.
I let Eric sit in the driver’s seat for a minute.
Side view. I still just love spoilers, even on corolla type cars. It ain’t fancy, but it’s awful cute.
Fancy remotes again. The only pic I sent to my parents when the deal was done.
See my smiling face in the chrome? I’m a goober.
I can’t believe we own a car with a Panama license plate.
Maybe this covers the antennae? Not sure. Looks like a shark fin to me, and I like it!
You probably can’t tell, but the lugnuts are blue, just like the car!

So, as for the rest of the weirdness with Alberto, we decided to meet up at 8:15 the next morning to be ready for the office to open at 8:30.  In the meantime, I discovered that the transfer document said that my name was “Paris Julie Solms” because US passports list our last names on the top line and our first and middle on the next line.  Luckily that turned out not to be a big deal.  Anyway, at 6 am, I got a text (Whatsapp) from Alberto saying that he was already at the Municipio because the first office that we had to go back to to check about the order of my name opened at 7.  WHAT?  Exactly.  It made no sense.  I ignored it and tried to go back to sleep.  About an hour later he texted again (still over an hour before we were supposed to meet up) saying “Que bueno!” or “How great!” for no apparent reason.  I hadn’t responded to the first text.  It was completely out of nowhere.  Really weird.

Anyway, I got there around 8 or 8:15 and we finished the paperwork and all is well.  A few other interesting tidbits.  If you have WhatsApp, you might know that when you text someone, you can see their profile photo.  So when I first received a message from the person who I only knew as the owner of this Yaris that I was interested in, I thought it was a really beautiful young woman.  Needless to say, it was surprising to see this guy show up.  He then told me that he was a helicopter pilot and showed me a picture of the giant helicopter that he flew.  He also had all his gear in the backseat of the car.  He used to be in what was formerly the Army and the Air Force and has since combined into one military branch.  He now, if I understood him correctly, works for the Presidential administration in some way, again, as a helicopter pilot.  I wanted to ask more, but felt stupid that I wasn’t understanding him.  It was also 8:30 am, I didn’t feel well, and I just wanted to get the paperwork done.

So now I’m googling him to see what I can find out.  I do have his full name, after all, and the equivalent of his social security number – although those numbers are much less of a secret here.  He texted his to me so I could get the cashier’s check, for example.

Now for a few UNC matters:

In remembrance of the (I believe 7th?) anniversary of Eve Carson’s death, I wanted to post this.  I love this quote.  It very much embodies my feelings about Carolina.

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On Carolina/Dook game day, I believe that Eve would be with me in saying GO HEELS!!!  And, having not known her, I won’t bring her into this one, but GO TO HELL DOOK!

Thanks to Becca for sending me this photo, taken today at my beautiful Alma Mater:

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Here’s hoping my parents let me FaceTime with their TV tonight!

Not Maid for Each Other

First of all, I’d like to thank Amber for noticing in one of the photos of Marta in the last post, my computer screen showed that I was googling “how do i turn off the camera shutter sound iphone 5?”  I cracked up when she called me out on it.  I was trying so hard to be sneaky for y’all!

Alas, my relationship with Marta was not to be.  She broke up with us today.  Abruptly.  She changed her clothes at 1:30, after beginning work at 8 am.  That was my signal that she thought she had done enough work for the day and she was leaving.  HOWEVER, this is not the way things were going to go if I had anything to say about it.  I think I mentioned last time that Eric and I had made a basic list of things that needed cleaning around the apartment.  Basic things – clean out the microwave, do the dishes, do the laundry, clean the bathroom, etc.  She refused to work by a list and got an attitude with me.  So this time, I decided that I would see when she was ready to leave, then I would check my list and see what had not been done.

I also went around the apartment to see how things looked.  There was still dust in corners where she hadn’t moved our suitcases out of the way to sweep and mop.  There was dust under the beds that was easily visible.  There was dust in the tub that she had cleaned so perfectly last week.  She asked last week that I buy a squeegee for her to clean the showers, but when I looked at the glass in the showers, it was just as dirty as ever.

But she had an answer for everything.  She told me the soap scum on the shower glass was permanent.  I pressed her on it, and she insisted that there was no possible way to get it off.  No cleaner, no brush, no rag, nothing would remove it.  Eric noticed that the edge of a door was dirty from people closing it – you know how people press on the edge of a door to close it instead of using the doorknob?  She said it was just that the building was old and there’s no way to clean it.  My mother had me cleaning that stuff when I was 7 with soap and water.  After she left, it took Eric about 2 minutes to restore it to a beautiful white color.

I could go on with these stories.  I didn’t yell.  I tried to reason with her.  I asked her about things.  I told her that if I was paying her for a full day’s work, that meant that I got to say when she left.  She didn’t just get to pick up and leave at 1:30 because that’s when she wanted to go.  So there was one more thing.  Some dust in Eric’s office’s doorway.  A really easy thing.  I asked Eric to point it out b/c I was kinda afraid she was reaching her limit with me and it was time to put some man-of-the-houseness behind things.  I wondered if she would talk back to him like she did to me.  He asked me to get her attention and tell her that he had one more thing for her.  But that was the breaking point.  She said she was done.  It was better that she left and that she didn’t work for us anymore.  She took her stuff, let me check her bag, and offered to give our number to another girl she knows (to whom I’m sure she’ll say we’re tyrants).  And that was it!  I shouldn’t have given her the full $25, but I did.  Just was time for a clean break at that point.

I guess some of you will be shocked that I was assertive enough to run a large-ish Nicaraguan woman out of my house.  I didn’t yell.  I didn’t get mad even.  I just tried to use what I would call common sense.  She just wasn’t having it.  I did stand my ground.  I did respond when she gave me answers that were just plain sorry excuses.  I didn’t let her take advantage of me.

I don’t know what her experiences have been like in the past.  I really would like to know.  She told me that she had 3 years of experience working in Panama, but then she told me today that she only got to Panama in January of this year – a few weeks AFTER we arrived here.  I don’t know.  Anyway, that short chapter is over.  I’m not upset, just sad that I have to go through the process of meeting a new person and starting to get her accustomed to how I do things again.  Sigh.  I know, I know…again, poor Julie.  She’s having trouble with The Help.  Downton Abbey has been good therapy for me.  They totally get me.

Before she left, however, and before she got upset (I hope), she made some pork chops with ajies (or ajis?  I’m not sure) – little peppers – and onions and garlic, plus a squash pureé out of that big ole squash that you saw a few posts back.  Not bad.  She wasn’t the best cook, but the idea is a good one.  I’ll have to try it later.

Pork chops, squash, and our plant from...the bank? Why? Because...Panama.

Pork chops, squash, and our plant from…the bank? Why? Because…Panama.

More on our trip to the bank – or rather – the reason for it, in coming posts.

For now, I’ll leave you with a picture of Eric and the guy who stalked him for a good 20 minutes while he waited for a lady to bring him the coffeemaker we wanted from the storeroom.  It was pretty funny.  I have no idea what he thought Eric was doing, although I suppose he looked a little strange carrying the plant (above) from the bank around…

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