Tag Archives: Curiouser and curiouser

Fiestas Patrias

Happy Separation Day!

The month of November in Panamá is packed full of patriotic holidays.  The 3rd celebrates Panamá’s separation from Colombia, 4th is Flag Day, 10th is for celebrating the first cry of independence from Spain, and the 28th celebrates Panamá’s independence from Spain.  Basically, 2015 is over because everyone is on vacation from now until after Christmas.  Woohoo!

I’m not sure what was going on yesterday, but for some reason the whole alcohol section of the grocery store was covered with Caution tape and there were signs up citing some law saying you couldn’t buy alcohol on November 2nd.  Haven’t figured that one out yet.

Last night we saw that the big road in front of our apartment was shutting down, and it turns out there was a little parade!  We walked down to check it out, and I’m glad we did.  It was all (well, hopefully not all, but whatever) the city’s firefighters (bomberos) and a good number of cops too.  Pretty cool.  I don’t know how to describe it, but you know how you always feel a sense of quiet awe and respect for what those folks do whenever there’s an event honoring them?  It was like that.  Meanwhile, Eric was commenting that only one guy was good at his job b/c his torch was out while everyone else was carrying fire around.  Apparently we were on different pages.  Haha.

We woke up at 5 am to the sound of…what else would it be in this country…fireworks!  It was quite an amazing show too!  One of the most well-coordinated (the best coordinated?  I’m not sure how to say that.) that we’ve seen, and it lasted forever!  Apparently they just could not stand to wait to start celebrating las fiestas patrias.  I decided that they were probably wanting to be the first to wish my brother-in-law, Drew, a happy birthday, so I took a picture and sent it to him.  Happy Birthday from Panamá, Drew!  They’re throwing a huge party for you!

This morning the streets are closed again for another parade.  As with other holidays, like Carnival, a ton of people have left the city.  It’s kinda nice, actually.  Everyone else gets their vacation out of town, and we get a nice quiet stay-cation.

Tomorrow we’re making Eastern style NC BBQ for way too many people…speaking of quiet stay-cations.  Mono and I have been talking about doing this for months now, and we finally decided that Flag Day would be a good day.  Great, I thought.  Just Mono and Lourdes and maybe their two girls…nice relaxing day.  That is, until Mono announced at practice on Saturday that I would be hosting a BBQ and having everyone over!  This is the second time he’s done this!  Sigh.  Oh well.  I know it’ll be fun…we just have to find a big enough pot to make gallons of Brunswick Stew!

Eric’s parents are getting into town tomorrow night!  We’re very excited to be hosting them.  They’ll only be here for a short time, but I think we’ve come up with a pretty good schedule that will allow them to see some sights and also relax in the mountains for a couple of nights.

Oh!  On Saturday we had capoeira practice at the Canal Administration building, which is really impressive.  I know my mom is rolling her eyes right now b/c she wanted to check it out when they were here in March/April.  I thought it sounded super boring.  Oops.  Anyway, not many of us were there, but we had a great practice and a fun, relaxed roda.  Mono has a GoPro that he takes everywhere, so he got some cool shots…

The Shining

Matty’s Visit – Part II

After our little outing to the soccer game and to the discoteca/bar afterwards, I chatted with some folks at capoeira practice about the game.  I mentioned that we went out nearby afterwards, and since the stadium is not in the most savory area in town, they wanted to know where we had gone.  When I told them the place was called La Birra, they were all shocked!  Apparently the place is infamous…for what exactly, I’m not sure, but they were surprised that we (read: Matty) had made such a splash at this place.  I was proud.

Matty and Eric were happy to spend most of Saturday watching college football, courtesy of some kind of Roku magic.  That night, we decided to finally check out Trump Tower.  I know, I know, a rather political decision in this day and age, but really, it’s a big famous building here and we hadn’t seen it, so it was time to check it out.  Unfortunately for Matty, who again is from Texas, the nice restaurant in the building is called Tejas.  Oops, sorry Matty.  Luckily for him though, it’s not a Tex-Mex place.  It actually doesn’t even have a stereotypical Texas theme.  Not a single horseshoe in sight.  NO idea why they named it that.  Decent food.  Not fabulous, but decent.

Tejas, Trump Tower

Next, we met up with our friend Moisés at a bar in the same building.  You may remember Moi as the first guy to invite me into the roda at my first capoeira practice.  Sadly, for many reasons that I don’t fully understand, he left our group about 6 weeks ago, and I don’t think there’s much luck that we’ll convince him to come back.  Very sad.

Anyway, I think we were the only patrons at Tejas even though it was a Saturday, so we moved on pretty quickly.  We met up with Moi’s friends at a pretty happenin’ (obvs I’m down with today’s lingo) place called Altabar.  Super trendy.  Moi’s friends had ordered bottle service and were very nice to share with us, but none of the three of us were really up for dancing and even Moi didn’t seem super enthused about the placed, so Matt and Eric and I excused ourselves after an hour or so.

Trump Tower

Moí! My long lost friend. Some drama within the capoeira group caused him to leave us, so Eric, Matt, and I invited him out with us for a drink to celebrate his bday at Trump Tower.

Matty wanted to hit up one of the beaches nearby, so after some searching on airbnb.com we found a place on a beach called María Chiquita for a good price.  It had a huge pool, a beautiful beach, and a restaurant on the hotel grounds…an added benefit since there weren’t any real restaurants for at least 30 minutes from the hotel.  We were excited.  The owners live in the City, and when we met them to get the key, they offered to let us get there early and stay late, essentially giving us a whole extra day on the beach.  Plus, I recognized their Brazilian accent and got to use the very few Portuguese words that I knew that weren’t the names of capoeira moves.

So…we drove the 90 minutes to the beach, basically going from the Pacific to the Atlantic at Colón, then taking a right turn and heading up the coast about another 30 min.  We drove down a dirt road through a small town for maybe 7 minutes, then came to a gate in the middle of nowhere.  From there we could see the three towers of the hotel building.  It was a little surprising when the guards at the gate didn’t need to check a list for our name or anything, but whatever…we were there.

As we drove up – in the rain, I forgot to mention…great way to start a 36 hour beach trip – we noticed that the place was a little desolate.  Okay, a lot desolate.  A huge place with 3 towers, 10 stories each, and there were only 4 cars parked there?!  Hmm.  Definitely creepy.

Turns out we were the ONLY guests in the entire place.  The ONLY ones.  JUST us.  It was the weirdest thing ever to walk around this giant building and not hear or see anyone.  We kept saying it felt like we were in The Shining.  I half expected to see a creepy pair of twins in the hallway.

So besides that weirdness, it was raining.  All day.  Not normal Panamá 30-minutes-of-downpour-then-it’s-over kinda rain, but a steady NC dreary all day don’t-go-to-the-beach-today rain.  Ugh.  So there we were, stuck in our creepy hotel in the middle of nowhere, all laying on the bed watching a movie and napping and praying the rain would let up for a minute.

We eventually decided to just go down to the pool and make the most of it.  I chatted with the lonely bartender outside who was only there for us while the boys scouted out the beach, then they went for a swim.  Too cold for me.  Nice pool though!  We had fun with the glass side, as you can see from the pictures.

Long story short, we ended up not staying the night due to weather, lack of open restaurants nearby and lack of enthusiasm for the creepy feel of huge empty buildings.  Thanks for showing Matty the best of what you have to offer, Panamá.

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.