Tag Archives: Because…Panama

Aside

Coming soon to a Gringa near you: Chikungunya!

Lest you forget that we do live in the tropics, let me give you the mosquito bite count from a 2 hour capoeira practice on Saturday.  Inside…with windows open.

Right leg:  99 bites.  Left leg:  126 bites.  At least, that’s where I stopped counting.

I found it interesting that they seemed to gravitate towards only a few of us and left the others completely alone.  Obviously, they took a liking to me.  They also devoured the new girl to our group, a Finnish girl named Emma who has a similar complexion to mine.  Mahalia, who is a Panamanian dark skinned black woman, was also a favorite.  They didn’t seem to care at all about Lourdes or Mono, both brown skinned Panamanians, or about Kike (again, it’s pronounced Key-kay in Spanish, folks), a light brown skinned Venezolano.  No idea what the deal is there.

Mono was so sweet.  While we did our sit-ups, he used a tumbling mattress to fan us all, providing temporary relief from both the suffocating heat and the mosquitos.  Then again, maybe he just didn’t want to do sit-ups.  🙂

Matty’s visit – Part I

Matty flew in from Dallas by way of Los Angeles (as you do), arriving in Panamá at 6 am.  Few people can convince me to be across town in Panamá traffic at that hour of the morning, especially when it means coming back into the city when 800,000 other people are trying to get to work.  Luckily for him, Matty is one of those people.

After checking Matty into Hotel Paris and letting him say hey to Eric while I grabbed a shower, we headed off to the Canal.  You may recognize the sites of these photos, as I’ve begun to take similar photos with each guest.

I’m not gonna lie, we make 3-D glasses look…like this.
Matty at the Canal!

We met up with Eric for an early dinner in Casco Viejo at a restaurante called Casablanca (for no apparent reason) and couldn’t quite convince Matty to try ceviche yet.

The next morning, Matty and I figured out how and where to get tickets for Friday night’s activity while Eric worked.  Later, Eric had a break in his day, so we picked him up and headed out to Amador Causeway for lunch.  We tried a new restaurant (for us) called Mi Ranchito where we tried chiladas for the first time, at the suggestion of Marianela, our Spanish teacher.  Chiladas apparently have many variations, particularly in Mexico.  The variation that we’ve found here so far and that we’ve begun making at home since then is a Corona with lime juice and hot sauce with a salted rim.  It’s pretty amazing.

That night, Friday, thanks to Matt scoping out the schedule and finding out about it, we went to the Panamá v. Uruguay futbol game!  Very exciting.  Uruguay has a great team, so it was supposed to be a good game.  And it was a competitive game, but sadly we lost 0-1.  Boo.  However, there were many exciting parts of the experience that night.  First of all, our neighbor Elliott came with us, and he’s always fun.  Secondly, Mahalia came with a few of her friends, one of them being the kind of guy that buys everyone else pizza and beer.  Super nice.  Third, speaking of beer, this part was just amazing…

Unlike the $8-10 beers you get at stadiums in the States, these beers were 32 ounces each.  Serious beers.  And they were $2 each!  This is not like hey, well yeah, you’re in a 3rd world country so of course they are.  This is a very expensive city!  These are the cheapest beers we’ve seen here.  It’s worth it to go and treat the stadium as a bar even if you hate soccer.  Better yet, these beers had LIDS!

Elliott, our upstairs neighbor from Newcastle.
Mahalia and Me
Eric and the magical $2 beers with lids

USA – listen up for a minute, cause this is important.  If you have ever been to a concert or a sporting event that was not governed by the NCAA, you have had some idiot spill beer on you.  Or, you have been the idiot who spilled beer on someone else and the realization that it is impossible not to do this when they put the beer in flimsy plastic cups, overfill said cups, then send you into a crowd of 47 million screaming fans who are either jumping up and down, waving their hands about in disgust over a call, trying to squeeze by you to take a selfie, or all of these at once.  The solution is simple, people.  Fast food restauranteurs figured this one out at the dawn of time.  Panamá simply has us beat on this one, Uncle Sam.  Get it together and put lids on the beers.

Not only did these giant cheap beers come with lids, but the concession stand would give you a styrofoam tray-type thing filled with ice in which to carry your beers, in case you needed, as many fans did, to retrieve 12 giant beers at a time.  And remember folks, this is not American football we’re talking about.  The game is only 90 min long.  There is limited drinking time allocated to fans, so they make it count.

With sad hearts from the loss but happy temperaments from the drinking (at least for the boys…I was driving the bunch of hooligans), we left the stadium and decided to find a nearby bar and wait out the traffic.  There were a few options right near the stadium, including a casino next door.  However, Elliott knew exactly where to go.  In his charming accent, he insisted that we try out the “quite sparkly” place he had seen on the way in.  I’m a girl who likes a little sparkle and Eric and Matty didn’t have any better suggestions, so off we went.

The “sparkly” place turned out to just have a bunch of lights on it.  No glitter or sequins, sadly.  No harm done though.  We were wanded/patted down – don’t worry Mom, there was a separate women’s entrance with a female employee doing the pat-downs – then allowed in.  Turns out, Elliott had picked the perfect spot.  The place was pretty packed with fans who seemed to be over the game as soon as the music started.  Big bar, lots of seating, and outdoor seating area, and a big dancefloor in the middle.

Elliott went up to the bar and tried to order.  It seemed like a good idea to have the 6’3″ guy ordering, but alas, I saw that he was getting nowhere.  I stepped up on a barstool (not on the top of it…just on one of the things where you put your feet, you know, to make me normal human height) and chatted with a waitress for a second.  She motioned to someone and pointed at me, at which point I was directed to yell my order down the bar.  Awesome.  I ordered a bucket of Balboas for the guys, but wait…they were out of Balboas (a Panamanian beer) and only had Miller Lite.  WHAT?!  So weird.  Whatever, yes, Miller Lite is fine, yes, thank you.  Managed to make that work, and again, cheap beers.  We’ll have to get out to the seedy part of town more often.

After they polished off the bucket, I somehow convinced these three white boys to dance.  Matty’s usually up for dancing, so that wasn’t so hard.  Eric will occasionally do it, but doesn’t love it.  Elliott insisted that he had no rhythm but said he’d go with us anyway.  I ended up getting each of them onto the floor at least for a time.  We danced salsa and bachata (THANK YOU DIANA FOR TEACHING ME!), and it turns out that Elliott had some moves after all…he just hated being out there.

Matty, on the other hand, had a great time!  Here’s a picture that Elliott caught of us, although I think Matty’s real shining moments were when the bachata music stopped, the electronica started, and for a good 4 minutes or so, he was the ONLY person on the dancefloor.  All eyes were on our Gringo.  It was awesome.

Matty and Me Ownin' the Dance Floor

Matty and Me Ownin’ the Dance Floor

We decided to call it a night after giving folks just a taste of our dancing as we didn’t want to make anyone feel badly about their own skills.  On the way home around 2, it was decided that some kind of fried chicken was required.  Now, in Panamá, there is a chicken place called Pio Pio which is, of course, the sound baby chicks make when they speak Spanish.  There are hundreds of these places.  We passed 3 before we decided that we were going to stop and try one out for the first time.  There was some doubt about the sanitation grade of these places, but I think the standards for sanitation go down as the evening turns into early morning.  So I had the pleasure of ordering for these three goofuses, then ordered yuca fries for myself.  The cashier asked me how many I wanted.  How many fries?  What a weird question!  I have no idea!  Apparently they come in 4’s and are 10 cents a piece.  It’s very strange.

The conclusion?  Pio Pio is perfectly adequate late night food.  And it’s everywhere.  Excelente.

 

A VIP movie and Eastern NC comes to Panamá!

I’m a little overwhelmed by all the stories I have to tell from Matty’s visit last week, so I’ll warm-up my blogging skills by telling about our weekend.  Eric had a really long day of work on Friday, so we just took it easy that night…but I had plans for Saturday.  After a rousing capoeira practice for which only three of us showed up, Eric and I went to our very first VIP movie experience.  Fancy!

There is a new mall in town that opened in May and it is beyond fancy.  We’re talking Dolce and Gabbana, Louis Vuitton (I had to google how to spell it), Chanel, all the huge designer names that you never knew had stores because you live in North Carolina.  I hadn’t yet set foot in it because 1) there’s no way I’d ever buy anything there; 2) Eric, shockingly, has no interest in checking out the latest ridiculously expensive fashions with me; and 3) none of our visitors seem to have come to Panamá for the purpose of spending time in the mall.  Again, shocking.

But this mall, like maybe four others in town, has a VIP movie theater.  VIP means that they have fancy leather reclining chairs set up in pairs with side tables alla college classroom so you have a place for…wait for it…the food that the waitstaff delivers directly to your seat!!!!  Brilliant, right?  Asheville folk, it’s like the Asheville Brew and View, but with waiters and without fear of getting diseases from the old couches that they have.  A couple of big steps up, eh?

I was in charge of researching ticket purchasing, and unfortunately, I missed the memo that we were supposed to get them in advance.  We ended up sitting…in the front row.  As it turns out though, since we saw the new Misión: Imposible (NO, I will NOT translate that for you.) which was subtitled in Spanish rather than dubbed, we didn’t have to crane our necks to read subtitles.  This made it a rather enjoyable viewing experience, despite the “bad” seats.  We both ordered beers, which were served in actual beer mugs, which I prefer to pint glasses when in situations where I am rather likely to knock something over.  Stability and a low center are gravity are key to any beverage container within arm’s length of me.  We also ordered dinner.  I had some Japanese rice dish with shrimp and veggies.  It was a huge helping, so Eric ate a lot of it too.  Not phenomenal, but hey, it was a heck of a lot better than nachos.  Very filling.  Eric had some kind of pizza wrap thing that was in the shape of an ice cream cone.  Like, it was disturbingly close to the shape of an ice cream cone.  He said it was fine.  Meh, still a fun experience, and a good date night.

On Sunday we did a quick trip to one of the bigger but less fancy malls called Albrook.  Eric went by metro and I drove to see which was faster.  Problem is, I got lost inside trying to get to the previously determined meeting point.  Eric had planned to meet me upstairs in the food court.  I walked around for no less than 25 minutes (we’re talking speedwalking like my mother trained me to do in malls), consulting at least two directories which are brilliant in that they are electronic, but not so brilliant in that they don’t work…before arriving at the food court.  Unfortunately, I was at the food court with the giant staircase and the huge gorilla head, while he was at the food court with the carousel and the hot air balloons.  Whoops.

Anyway, I eventually found him, we met up for about 2 min, then we went our separate ways.  He again rode metro home…but we didn’t exactly communicate about who would be getting home when and who should have the key to our apartment.  I trusted his text saying he was leaving to head home, quickly wrapped up my errand of looking for skirts for a capoeira performance (a dance we’re doing in a show…we don’t wear skirts when we actually do capoeira, in case that’s unclear.  That would be tricky.), and got in the car.  He, meanwhile, figured I would be a while and that a stop by Wendy’s wouldn’t take too long.  Turns out, Wendy’s took forever making his spicy chicken sandwich – and “side” of fried chicken because, well, Panamá – so I beat him home by about 10 min.  We had given our key to a neighbor when he kept Addie for us last week and hadn’t gotten it back, so I was stuck in the hall for a bit.  No problem though.  I made a Panamá-friendly playlist on my phone in preparation for our upcoming dinner party.

When Eric let me into our house, we started cooking.  Eric was at the helm and I played sous chef, as usual.  We made Eastern Style NC pulled pork BBQ, Brunswick stew y cornbread.  It was amazing.  The plan had been to have Lourdes and Mono over, but they ended up not making it.  But no matter, our other friends Mahalia and Auri from capoeira and Elliott, our neighbor from Newcastle, came and gave our down-home country cookin’ a try.  We went REALLY easy on the spice b/c folks down here don’t typically like spicy food, but they really liked it!  They even took some leftovers to go, much to Eric’s chagrin.  I didn’t realize we didn’t have all that much left over and that I was not supposed to offer it to our guests.  Oops!  🙂

We also had some of our favorite newly discovered drinks.  They’re called chiladas.  Corona + lime juice + hot sauce with a salted rim.  It’s amazing.  I love it!

Anyway, it was my kind of night.  Spanglish spoken by all (and Eric did GREAT!  I was SO proud!), southern food, and fun friends.  Plus everyone here loved on my dog…an added bonus.  🙂

Okay, I told all the stories from Matt’s visit to our Spanish teacher today, so hopefully I’ll have them all in mind to share soon.