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.