The time I wished I had married an exterminator.

We had a little bit of drama on Wednesday night. We got back from the beach around 7, as usual, after Eric’s nightly kiting session. Eric jumped into the shower. When I went upstairs to our bedroom a moment later, I saw a giant creature crawling around near Eric’s suitcase. It seriously looked like a mouse, but it was dark black and flatter. I screamed and ran to the bathroom to ask Eric to do something about it. He was, well, mid-shower and not exactly in a position to take care of the situation, so he asked me to breathe and see if I could keep an eye on it. I put on some shoes – heaven forbid this thing should crawl on my feet – and peered around the bedroom door. The thing jumped out at me – a GIANT cockroach. I screamed my best horror movie scream, not on purpose, but just because this thing was horrifying. It was at least 3-4 inches long and built like a freaking tank. It had to be an inch tall. I kept screaming, then started crying hysterically and shaking.

Eric got out of the shower and search the whole room for the thing, but never found it. That’s the worst part. I had no idea where it was going to come from next, but I was pretty sure that it would crawl around on me in bed that night.

I kept crying and shaking while I showered, while I got dressed, and while Eric calmly searched the room again and ushered me towards the door so we could go to dinner, as planned.

Y’all…I DO NOT do roaches. And I have never in my life seen one this size. We have lizards around the house to take care of the mosquitos, but this thing was 4 times the thickness of any of our lizards. All I could think about was how I wasn’t going to be able to sleep in our house that night, how we were going to have to leave Panamá and go back to my fully enclosed and insulated house, and how horrible I would feel asking Eric to go back home with me when I’m supposed to be supporting his awesome kiting hobby.

Luckily, my husband knows me. He suggested an anxiety pill and a glass of wine at dinner. I stopped crying by the time I got to the restaurant, thought I didn’t want to stop. We had a really nice dinner at the small hotel across the street that is owned by a lovely French couple – Casa Amarilla.

On the way home, Eric even offered to sleep in the car with me that night if that would make me feel safer. We ended up being fine back in our house, but y’all, that can’t happen again. It was awful. It’s official, I’m not supposed to live in Savannah or Florida or any place where the bugs are wider than my shoes. I’ve decided to embrace it. I’m an inside girl, unless wildlife can be kept at bay. I like outside, but I like the sun and trees and flowers and lakes and beaches part, not the creepy-crawlers.

I’m just really glad I hung up the phone with Laine, my 7 year old niece, before I freaked out. My sister Jennifer is considering bringing her down for a visit in March, and I don’t think my reaction would’ve gone over well with her.

On another weird wildlife note, our car got attacked by a pack of wild dogs today. We were on the way to town for a grocery store run, when two dogs appeared on the road ahead of us. Eric slowed down. Three more dogs appeared, barking and running towards our car. They immediately reminded me of hyenas and the Lion King. Eric slowly moved the car forward, but we heard a few bonks and bumps and both of us thought he might have run over one of them. Thank goodness all of them were safe…it had been them running into us rather than the other way around. What in the world?! So bizarre. Panamá always has a new surprise for us.

Tonight we’re expecting our good friends Mono (the head of my capoeira group), Lourdes (his wife), and their daughters Cari and baby Sereia, who is only 2 months old!

Two days after they leave, Eric’s cousin David arrives. The day after David leaves, we pick up our friend Sarah Jessica at the airport! It’s going to be an exciting few weeks!

Power outage, our community, and more kiting.

By the time our guests left on Sunday afternoon, our power and water had gone out. There is no great story here. We were just without power and water all afternoon and evening. We ate leftovers for dinner by candlelight – more spooky than romantic, given the spiders and creepy-crawlers around, then went for a short drive around town to see who had electricity. Then…what else were we going to do? We fell asleep.

Eating leftover chorizo and yogurt in the dark

On Monday and Tuesday, I started to get into a routine. I did some writing each morning poolside, then yoga, then dishes. On Monday I also took a walk to explore the neighborhood, as it were. Here are a few pics from that walk, to give you an idea of what’s around. These aren’t necessarily representative of Punta Chame as a whole, but rather just things I thought were interesting.

Both evenings we went down to Machete. The wind was too strong for Eric’s kite size (10 m) on Monday evening, so we just got drinks at the bar and sat on the beach to watch the sunset kiters…my favorite thing ever. On Tuesday, we walked the 1.4 miles to Machete together, and Eric went out in a mass of 25 or so kites and did a great job in all the traffic! I sat down with Itzick and Roco for a bit, and Itzick commented on how well Eric was doing. Then both Itzick and I took pictures of the bulldog in the sunset b/c, well, Roco’s awesome.

 

 

Itzick and Roco – can’t tell if Eric’s in the background or not. Sometimes it’s hard to tell at sunset.

 

 

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.