Shopping in Panama

My expat friends warned me, "If you see something you want, buy it. Don't wait, because it probably won't be there the next time you go."

Eeep.  This requires a major change in the way I do things. I like to pre-shop, price compare, brand compare, and style compare before I make a selection. Having to just grab the first thing that appeals to me goes seriously against my grain.  Now some would say that I am just procrastinating.  And some would say I have gotten seriously tight fisted.  Others might congratulate me on my shopping skills.

"Some" might be right.

In any case, the warnings were absolutely on target. By the time that I finished comparing, contrasting and evaluating, my preferred item was usually gone, never to be seen again. I saved quite a bit of money using this program, but I didn't get the things I wanted.

This maxim is apparently true of all stores in Panama. Even the grocery store.

I was appalled the first time I went to buy milk and there was none. The segment of refrigerated shelving where the milk was bare.  So were the shelves where I usually could find the 15 different styles of the ultra-pasteurized stuff.  Nothing there, either.  Because the shelves are reorganized daily and products are constantly being shifted around the store (which is another reason you can't find what you're looking for) I asked a clerk where the milk was.

His response was a shrugged, "No hay," meaning “There isn't any.”

Well, when would there be more?

He didn't know.

I was bursting with the desire to learn why. Had they simply run out? Would more be coming with the next truck? Would there BE a next truck? Was there a strike? Were the roads blocked again? What? My Spanish was not yet strong enough for me to pursue this, so I had to be content with "there isn't any."

After that I switched permanently from fresh milk (which often went bad the day after purchase anyway) to the ultra-p stuff in a box that keeps for six months. And I made sure that I always had a few boxes stashed for the next time "No hay."

In the deodorant, shampoo and hair color aisle, there always seem to be a minimum of three store employees restocking or reordering the shelves. This always seems to involve blocking the aisle as completely as possible with cartons, product and bodies.  If a customer should be so bold as to venture into the restocking area in search of a product, she will receive either a glare or rolling eyes. This is because, I believe, no one has bothered to tell the employees that the purpose of the store is not to provide them with jobs, but to sell product. And for this to happen, the customers have to be able to get to the product and select it. Not all stores have this attitude, just a few big ones. No names.

Another, similar manifestation that amazes me is the employees on guard duty in front of certain products, such as frozen meats. Apparently they are there to prevent shoplifting. In effect, they also prevent shopping. Having someone stare at you with icy suspicion while you pick out next week's lunch does not improve the shopping experience.

Me, I would just quit going to that particular store.  Except, for some things, it’s the only game in town.   

Well, I moved here because I wanted an adventure.  Someone very wise once defined “an adventure” as “a bummer re-framed.”  That's true.  It's all in how you look at it.  And frankly, I'm having a ball.  I love it here.  Even when I run out of milk.

Walking the calf

Dateline: Panama

     A calf on a leash is eating weeds just outside my backyard this morning.  His owner is with him, walking him like a dog, as the calf slowly snacks up the road.  That's a pretty busy road, so I'm pleased the owner has him on a lead. 

     When I lived at the beach an entire herd regularly "escaped" and came strolling past hunting greens.  But now I live in town, a 10 minute walk from the town center.  I hadn't expected this kind of bucolic experience here, but I'm delighted.  This kind of thing is why I live in Panama, why I love living here.

     The grass is pretty long, as you can see.  It grows incredibly fast and with great determination.  We had the place scalped not 3 weeks ago, and now there's at least 16 inches to cut.  Most people use a weed whacker (a man with a weed whacker can support a family quite well here), but some cut their grass with a machete.  As a machete is only about $2.50, I bought myself a "knoife" and gave it a try.  I even used a whetstone first - and during.  I can safely say that it is not my thing.  I'm calling the guy with the weed whacker today.  The calf didn't eat nearly enough.

It's Cold, je-je

     Dateline: Panama.  Well I never thought I would say this.  It's only 75 degrees F. this morning and I am cold.  I must have acclimated, because I am seriously considering a sweater.  This from the yogini who, in Northern California, Oregon, Washington and sometimes in Montana, forgot to put her coat on half the time until well into November or even December.  But I am.  Cold.

     And I think I may have caught the local grunge too, although so far my only symptoms are a slight headache and the tiniest desire to cough.  However, it's green.  My daughter tells me that the latest word is that you can no longer tell whether your lung infection is bacterial or viral by checking the color of what a cough provides.  Apparently those pesky viruses have learned to mimic bacteria and also make your stuff green now.  Huh.  I told her I had always been green, every time, and just figured I was sick if it wasn't clear or at least white.  If I'm sick, it's green. Period.

     So I guess I'm sick.  My lurid imagination constantly drifts back to the fly I swallowed a couple of weeks ago.  And of course, to dengue fever.  I have a friend who shudders delightedly over tales of assassin bugs and dengue fever-bearing Aedes mosquitoes.  But I have no fever.  My daughter says that's probably a clue and I should relax.

     So what does one do for a "cold" here in the tropics?  My favorite "fake a fever" methods to force the old healing sweat seem a bit redundant here.  By evening I am often so damp I hardly need any extra water if I wanted to wash my "dewy" clothes.  So no sweat lodge variations.  That leaves ingesting a ton of vitamin C and chicken soup.  Last time I had a cough my taxista (taxi driver) told me I should eat lots of garlic.  "Ajo, Jacqi," he said with a stern look.  "AJO."  

     That's pronounced Ah-ho.  Which sounds like a cough, itself.  And brings on a round of the Spanish textual giggle: je je je, ja ja ja, jo jo jo. Je-je.

     OK.

I Swallowed a Fly. P'raps I'll Die.

      It's fly season here in Panama.  A truly local experience in many ways.  The flies hatch about a month after the rains start. (The rains were late this year.)  For 3 or 4 weeks there are flies everywhere, into everything.  Screens, fly swatters, fly traps are no help.  It's impossible to avoid them, landing on you, playing tag, dive-bombing your food.  

     The long term expats are easy to spot by their casual attitudes.  They put decorated woven containers over the food, but when the snack-intent hordes manage a landing, they are quite casual in waving them off and eating it anyway.

     Quite suddenly, fly season will be over.  The flies are gone once more and you will seldom see one until next fly season.

     Yesterday I poured some milk into my coffee, only to observe the dead fly swimming in it.  I had carelessly left the milk carton on the kitchen counter for a few moments, and the fly had gone inside the little opening hunting for lunch.  And it's not as though I am so green that I didn't know it would certainly happen.  The week before I had – maybe not so briefly – turned my back on an open pot of coffee.   I was later rewarded with a cup of dead, coffee soaked flies. 

      And it's not as though I always spot them BEFORE I take a drink.  Two weeks ago I swallowed one.  Now, however, I am alert to the texture, which is faintly reminiscent of a small, waterlogged raisin.  So day before yesterday when I took a nice swig and found it full of raisins, I immediately spit it out.  

     The essential thing is to keep one's mind free of where that raisin might have been.

Transitory Hangovers - Butt a Cultural Tidbit

     It is not solely my butt that hangs over the edge of the seats on Panamanian buses, but nearly everyone's.  I usually try to grab a window seat, but I was late getting to the station for my trip to la Cuidad, and all that was left was an aisle perch.  My seatmate - a gentleman unknown to me - sat like nearly all Panamanian men with his legs splayed wide open, taking up what I considered far more than his share of real estate and leaving me to hang my left cheek over the seat and into the aisle.  Of course, I said nothing and just toughed it out for an hour until he shifted his position a bit.  Then believe me, I shifted too.

     I had noticed as I struggled past seated bodies to my chair, how little space there was in the aisle.  When I actually looked, I realized it was filled with unsupported butt cheeks!

     The bus was one of those large mini-vans.  I believe it may have been made in China, because most everything in Panama seems to be these days.  Besides, none of the passengers over the age of 10 seemed correctly sized.  For the seats, I mean.

     The bus seats in these vans are set two and two, with a half-seat width open between them to provide an aisle.  I expect that four Chinese adults would probably fit nicely in a row.  However, the majority of Panamanian men in my part of the country are built like the bulls they raise.  Said men, judging from what one of my gringa lady friends observed about the plastic ladies displaying clothing for sale in stores, are fond of "bubble-butts" on their sweeties.  So the distaff side of the passengers are frequently hefty also.  This leads to a serious bus-wide shortage of real estate for the behind, and makes traversing the aisle to a rear seat a serious exercise in pushing through obstacles. The aisle is wide enough for slender 10-year-olds to traverse without struggle. 

     And the moral of the story – should you need one – is, if you plan to carry anything you must keep with you (luggage, packages, a backpack) onto one of these buses, wait and take one of the bigger buses later.  . 

    This hot tip brought to you at no charge.  :)

A Sad, Sad Story About Why It is Essential to Learn Spanish in Central America

     I believe most people are terrified of  speaking a foreign language on the phone, at least at first.  I was. Now I am to the point that it frustrates me more than scares me, but I'm kicking myself for not studying harder.  Why?  Because after a certain Spanish speaking gentleman and I hung up moments ago in mutual frustration, I put together the bits I understood and light-bulbed that he was telling me … I actually WON THE CAR they were raffling off at the Los Santos Feria! 

     Too bad, so sad.  In fact, double "demonios," which is how they translate "bad words" from English to Spanish on TV.  A) My phone connection with this gentleman whose number was "Unknown" was horrible because I had bought a really cheap phone and I couldn't understand most of what he said (lesson #1).  B) My Spanish is still so uncertain I couldn't understand the rest of what he said either (lesson #2).  So we said "Ciao" and hung up.

     As the call drifted into history and I replayed it mentally, I recognized certain words and phrases, "tiene ganar" being one of them, and realized that I had just run over my own foot with a free Honda Yaris I would now not be getting.

     Waaaaahhh.

     The moral of this story? Aprende bien el español.

A Whole Lot of Bull

    Dateline Panama: The Los Santos Feria comes once a year.  A sort of county fair, it features thousands of exhibits, hundreds of food vendors, lots of merchandising, and plenty of handsome animals.  Participants come for the fun from all over the province, and from all over Panama.

    My friends and I wandered through displays of pretend cane fields, cornucopias of piled papayas and mangoes and guayabanas and other tropical deliciousness, past a complex agricultural display tucked behind a truly remarkable fence made from corn dried on the cob in the shapes of pinwheels, flowers and geometric shapes, and on to the rows upon rows of prize bulls neatly tethered at precise distances from each other beneath a very long cow-port.

    I was particularly charmed by the bulls.  Cattle here tend to be extremely lean. Skinny, even. Not to digress, but nearly any meat you can buy at the store is lean and stringy. It doesn't make a good burger. (TIP: I often have the butcher regrind the meat with some fat. When I do that the meat makes incredibly tasty burgers, and costs me half as much.)

    These bulls would not need to be re-ground with extra fat.  But who would be crazy enough to do that? These big boys are valuable for their flesh in a different venue - their sexual prowess. They are breeders, at around $10,000 per ton, give or take.

    A variety of Brahma cattle, they are usually a gorgeous cream-rich-in-butterfat color, and so large that were I to dare the act, we could stand shoulder to shoulder.  They have the Brahma hump, and beautiful big brown eyes. They are magnificent.

    But I will state categorically that those bulls had to have been drugged. There is otherwise no way that much testosterone could stand around in the same place, placidly tethered and chewing its cud.

I watched one mammoth beast salute the bull next to him. Possibly their drugs were wearing off a bit. They butted heads, gently slamming together the flat planes across the fronts of their skulls. A bit of desultory pushing that didn't involve either of them moving half an inch, then they mutually decided eating would be more fun, and so returned their individual attentions to the bin in front of them.

Neon Treats in Panama

            I love Central America! I love the flash and the verve, the willingness of the people here to live in Technicolor.

            Last night as I rode the bus home from Panamá to Las Tablas, I saw three different trucks decorated with neon.  The first was one of those enormous long-haulers, the kind with the wolf-style snouts, flat-hooded and tapering to a snub.  That snout / hood and the front of the cab above it were striped in green neon, emphasizing the sheer machismo, the size and power of the machine.

            And, of course, making it infinitely more visible on the road.  How eminently sensible, no?  As well as lots of fun.  Imagine that looming out of the darkness behind you.

            The other two trucks were  smaller, more short-haul types, with rounded noses outlined and details picked out in orange-red neon.  One was especially charming – where the green truck resembled a wolf, the cat-like qualities of this one were emphasized.  The decorator had also placed a couple of round lights on top of the cab where ears would be.  Sooo cute.  I must tell you about the buses, too.  Next time.  I do love these little treats in Central America.

NOT SO DESPERATELY SEEKING SUSAN, PART 2

I have a dog. She is approximately 6 inches long and 6 inches high. She weighs 3 pounds, seldom barks and is trained to use paper when we can't go outside.  Her favorite way to get around is to have me carry her in a black handbag that was built for carrying small dogs. It has a bone-shaped black mesh "window" and a clip to fasten to her harness. We also have a regulation soft-sided carrier so she can scoot under the seat on an airplane.

An airplane. Huh.  Take a dog with you on the plane?  Only if you are willing to pledge your first-born and all your back teeth and you are in a country where they aren't terrified of dogs.  Buses?  The buses want you to put your innocent little baby in the belly with the luggage and the heat and the fumes.  This seems to be especially true in countries that were once notorious for having live chickens in with the passengers.

I have smuggled her onto buses. And got caught at the other end, too. No return trip.  That's a nightmare story for another time.  This one is about getting the dogette from Costa Rica to Panama.

So, I had checked all possibilities and none of them looked good.  For one thing, I had managed to accumulate a tiny amount of stuff in Costa Rica, mostly bedding and a few pots and pans, and I was very attached to my pillows in particular, hating the thought of leaving them behind.  I concocted all sorts of elaborate schemes whereby I would roll the bedding into a black plastic bag, mash it all down really well and lash the bag to my duffle so that at the border and when changing buses I would be able to manage the duffle, the bedding bag, the backpack, my purse and the dog carrier. What folly.

In Costa Rica I had successfully smuggled the tiny dogette on both long distance and local buses many times in her closed carrier.  She is very quiet and most people don't even notice her.  However, Panama tends to be a bit more uptight about rules and regs than Costa Rica.  In Panama the enforcers are soldiers serious about their work.  In Costa Rica they did away with the military some twenty years ago.  So learning that Panama was officially no more welcoming to dogs than Costa Rica was definitely an Oh, s_ _t_  moment.

What to do?  I thought about renting a car.  Alas, not possible for various reasons.  I ran scenarios where I took taxis between towns.  That actually might have worked pretty well, looking at it in retrospect.  Taxis are less expensive in Panama than they are in Costa Rica.  It certainly wouldn't have cost more than the option I chose.

In any case, how I would get myself, my stuff and la dogette to Panama fell into the category of what Alan Tutt, an excellent teacher of manifesting, calls "The Dread Hows."  When you desire to manifest something, the instruction is to focus on the desired outcome and let the universe work on "how" to make it happen.  I have always been pretty good at manifesting for myself, but I never really realized before this very moment that IS what I do.  At first I run through all the options I can think of for accomplishing what I want and if none of them suit, I don't worry about it.  I just keep going with the other aspects of my objective and something viable invariably turns up in the empty sector.  It just sort of drops into my lap.

So I stopped fussing about modes of transportation and instead began organizing la dogette's paperwork.

Now I had already gone through an intense series of hassles with the dogette's paperwork back in the States.  Costa Rica and Panama both require a rabies shot within 1 year and a certificate of good health.  I had both those things when I left North Carolina, but the customs officer in the San Jose airport KEPT the International Health Certificate, which had cost me over $100 USD to get by the time I finished paying for the veterinary exam, the form, and Fedex both ways to get it to and from the appropriate government agency in a timely fashion.  The customs official wasn't supposed to KEEP the certificate, he was supposed to stamp it and give it back. I was so upset! But there wasn't a thing I could do about it except get another health certificate in Costa Rica.  They told me it would cost me another $100 USD.

So I put it off and put it off.  But after I finally decided on a date of departure, I realized I had to deal with it and went down to get the certificate. The vet had previously told me I should do it two weeks in advance of my departure date.

This vet, who shall remain nameless because I haven't a lot of nice things to say about him, showed up for our appointment an hour late.  His "exam" consisted of holding the dog up in the air and turning her from side to side. "Hmm, she looks good," he pronounced.  However, in spite of the fact that her rabies shot was current and did not need to be repeated for 6 months, he thought we had better give her one anyway.  The system in the US where each shot is numbered and the number is on the tag, on the certificate and recorded with the state is not good enough in Costa Rica to prove your dog has been vaccinated, so it was necessary to have a Costa Rican rabies shot or the officials would not pass the health certificate.  Or so he said.  As he was only charging me $40 for the form and another $16 for the "exam" and getting the paperwork handled, and I wasn't going to be able to get her into Panama without the shot, I agreed, for $5.  So finally I was in possession of the stamped paperwork, and then I found out that he had done only half the job!  The stamped paper had to go to San Jose and be stamped some more!

So I hopped a bus ($6) for the 3 hour trip over the "Mountain of Death" to San Jose, where I took a 15 minute taxi ride ($7) to the address provided by the consulate as the place of stamping.  But no!  Animals? No! This was the Ministry of Agriculture and "We never do animals!  Never! Never! Never!  You must take this to Zapote!"

And where is that? Someplace way out there ($13).  My taxista, who was the nicest man, got lost. To his credit once he knew he was lost he turned off the meter until we arrived.  There we first encountered folks who wanted to send us someplace else, mostly based on my bad Spanish and the taxista's limited understanding of the situation, until someone actually looked at the paperwork and realized we really were in the right place.  At that point they delivered us into the hands of one of the good Doctors in the department who, incidentally, spoke perfect English.  A very witty man, he gave me a rundown on how to get a dog across the Panamanian border.  If you fly, he told me, you must have all your t's crossed and your i's dotted.  You must have your health certificate with it's stamp, and proof of a rabies shot. You must get signatures from the correct agricultural attorneys and you must go to the Department of Exterior Relations and be stamped. Also you must be prepared to pay the "Home Quarantine F'ee" (translation: bribe) of $140 when you arrive in the airport so that your dog will not be impounded for 30 days. 

However, if you are driving, he told me, it is a different story and everything depends on the official who is working at the border that day.  You need only the health certificate and proof of rabies vaccination.  Sometimes you do need the signatures of the attorneys, sometimes not.  "Fortunately I am an attorney and since you have already paid, let's just stamp this now and I will sign it and put the embossing seal on it." 

He then told me that it has been demonstrated that you can hire someone to watch the dog while you go through the border-crossing process. Then, once you are safely on the other side you could simply whistle for the dog, which would then make the crossing on its own, sans paperwork.

A wonderful apocryphal tale, no?  Full of defiance and the derring-do of pirates and revolutionaries other scoff-laws. Personally, I would never be willing to risk my baby that way, plus the story does not say what happens at the control checkpoint where the soldiers stop your car and demand to see your processed paperwork for the car and passports.  An obvious dog passenger… hmm.

OK. So I had all the t's crossed and he insisted that I did not need to cross the final i since I was not flying.  So we skipped the Department of Exterior Relations and my taxista delivered me ($14) back to the station for my bus ride back across the Mountain of Death ($6).  Adding it up, we see that $40 + $16 + $5 + $6 + $7 + $13 +$14 +$6 = $107  which is $7 more than I would had had to pay a vet who knew his business, not to mention that I could have spent the day at the pool instead of taxiing around San Jose in the heat.  So unless you are already IN San Jose and have a car with air conditioning and all the time in the world, if you are ever offered a deal on an  international health certificate for your dog in Costa Rica, run the other way! 

To be continued…

NOT SO DESPERATELY SEEKING SUSAN, PART 1

Many of you know that I was born in Panama.  In the city of Colon, as opposed to the city of David. Claiming the latter could have been fun, but oh-well. And then I was adopted. Anyway, the birth certificate says that Mom was British, by name one Susan Stockin, and the apocrypha says that Mom was connected with the royals in some obscure way. Who would give that the least bit of credence that if it were not for the fact that the trail has been blocked?  All traces removed?  Is stone cold?  On a Neolithic scale of freezing.  Which is to say, there is NO information about my origins.

I grew up secretly believing, as many adopted children do, that I was really a princess. This was before I ever heard the apocryphal story. At the time I was just glad I had been adopted by regular people because I thought princessing sounded like a really rotten job. From what little I could see a princess almost never got to do anything she wanted to do, she had to marry whatever dork her family picked out for her, and she had to spend an awful lot of time doing what my young self considered dumb things like christening ships, waving at people, giving interviews and looking nice while holding flowers at hospitals.

I had known I was not a biological member of the live-with family since maybe forever, in spite of all the well-meant lies they told me, but it didn't really bother me. I was never especially obsessed with finding the birth parents, as some adoptees are.  I had been adopted – that meant somebody really, really wanted me – and then I had been adopted again after my first adoptive mother died and my adoptive father remarried.  And in spite of the fact that the second mother and I were mutually not in love, I still felt sufficiently wanted and had no internal pressure to hunt down people who emphatically didn't want me.

When I was 18 I received a graduation gift of a trip to Europe.  This necessitated getting a passport. So step-adoptive mother hauled out the birth certificate and for the first time I saw my birth mother's name: Susan Stockin, British citizen.

Father: unknown. Huh. I bet Susan knew who he was.  And then the fateful line: Born out of wedlock and therefore illegitimate.  Well.

That was in 1942 when stuff like that still mattered, and if a girl was a bit fast you said she was "no better than she should be."  And everyone knew what you meant.  Old biddies in particular.  So can't you just see the pinched lips below a faint mustache on the nurse making that entry?  Can't you just see the neat, no-hair-out-of-alignment chignon under the crisp cap, and the glint of the cat's eye glasses as she wrote? 

My step-adoptive mother was mortified by that line of text. She could not deal with it, and didn't want me to have to deal with it either. Not anticipating the loose ways of the world to come, she destroyed the document after I had been safely en-passported and citizenized.  (Yes, I had been an illegal alien for 18 years and nobody had the least idea. Woohoo.)

It wasn't until Step-Adoptive Mom had been laid to rest for some years and I was in my thirties (it was about 1982) that I needed that fateful document again. I managed to use my passport for proof of birth and age. However, in the process my then sweetie, Steve, had his curiosity bump excited and with my permission he began trying to track Susan down. 

This was when we discovered the trail was blocked. 

Steve was a determined investigator.  He made phone calls to Panama. He wrote letters.  He contacted the military and the diplomatic services for Panama, Britain and the US.  He called the embassies and the consulates.  Short of physically barging into offices, he made his presence known as an investigator.

And there was nothing there.  The trail was non-existent.  It was as though I had never been born, had never even had my adoptive father push on his own commanders to obtain emergency clearance so he could take me to the states.

We both thought this was a very suspicious circumstance.  Too much TV?  Maybe.  But what was there to do about it anyway?  I was not really interested in continuing to try to meet people who so obviously did not want to meet me. I told Steve to drop it.

And so it stayed until 2010, when once again I needed my birth certificate because I wanted to teach ESL in Mexico.  I had pretty much forgotten how much trouble Steve had in his search, and sent off a letter (with a check for the very healthy fee) to the Panamanian Consulate asking for help in finding my birth certificate.  It only took a week or so for a note scribbled at the bottom of my letter to be returned to me along with the check.  "Sorry, we are unable to locate it."

Well, I thought, when I am in Mexico I will at least be closer, and perhaps I will pop down to Panama for a visa-run.  It would make a nice vacation, too. 

So toward the end of my allotted days in Mexico, I bought a ticket for Panama.  But the trip was fated not to be that year. A mere month before departure I slipped in the tiled shower of my 'habitacion' and fell.  My wrist shattered and I was forced to fly home for repairs.

It took me another year and a half to recover and save up to try again.  This time I got talked into going to Costa Rica by well-meaning friends.  It's true that Costa Rica is totally gorgeous, from the countryside to the people.  And I certainly do not regret going there, particularly since I felt some renewed connection with my first adoptive mother, who died in the jungles there. 

She and Daddy adopted me because they could have no children of their own.  Then, the frequent miracle occurred – once the pressure of desperately wanting a child was off, she became pregnant.  Unfortunately, it was a tubal pregnancy and she was on vacation in the Costa Rican jungle when my potential sibling began to make him or herself known.  So the only one of my mothers who really wanted me perished there before they could get her to medical help.  I was six months old.

Daddy pressured his commanding officers and pushed through the paperwork that allowed me to enter the US when he flew back with her ashes.  He presented us both to her mother, my beloved Gram.

Nearly 70 years later, here I was, living in Costa Rica but thinking constantly about Panama.  Panama is right next door.  Life is cheaper in Panama.  I want to see Panama. Etc.  But there so many come hithers in Costa Rica – the unequalled natural beauty of the land, the riotous bursts of flowers, the pleasure of seeing so many lovely, smiling faces wherever you look.  And the kindness of the people.  Friends.  And then there were the expelling factors – the local hacker who had been after me, the constantly rising cost of living, the bad plumbing in my cabina, the bugs that simply love to munch me. 

One day when I was half-mad from scratching a fresh set of bites from an unknown insect, had just returned from spending way too much on groceries, and opened the door to my cabina to be met with a deep whiff of sewer, I made the decision. It was time to move to Panama.

To be continued…

BORDER DRAMA AND DRUG-SNIFFING DOGS

 When the bus stops at Paso Canoas on the Panama side of the Panama-Costa Rica border, Panamanian soldiers herd everyone and all their goodies off the bus and into a stark white room with a small interrogation closet bumped out of one corner. (Well, what else would you call a 6 x 6 room with a one door and a grilled window?)

We were required to place our luggage in two tidy rows and ourselves against the wall while the soldiers watched us.  Then – O the drama! – a soldier with a beautiful young white dog appeared at the entry door.  Thrilled to see the luggage, the dog plunged, barking madly, against his leash. We passengers sucked in expectant breaths. The TV program I had seen about dogs trained to find drugs indicated they bark to signal a find!  The dog could smell it from the doorway!

Released from his restraint, Señor Canine Inspector made a bee-line to the first suitcase, sniffing it over with gusto, then the next, and the next. The fourth item was a cloth shopping bag, into which poochy's nose plunged deep. The owner remarked that the dog seemed to like the smell of his lunch, and the soldier pulled said enthusiastic snout back out of the bag and directed it to further investigation. So Señor Inspector Perro continued his rounds, lingering at one set of belongings in particular, but never barking.  After checking the suitcase and three shopping bags carefully, he lifted his leg with intent to mark.  Fortunately, his handler was able to stop him before much liquid escaped.  The passengers erupted into laughter. 

After identifying two more lunches, doggy was finished, re-leashed and led away. The soldiers now demanded to know whose luggage had been peed upon.  A bewildered woman with a three month old infant stepped forward and was led into the interrogation closet.

We were not told, but I suspect a combination of soiled baby clothes and a dog at home as the source of our intrepid canine inspector's interest. Mother and child were released fairly quickly, the rest of the passengers collected their belongings, and emptied the room.  One of the soldiers produced a mop and swished it across the semi-circle of urine drops.  Apparently, that kind of thing is not unusual.  Hmm.