Independence Day parade

I caught this Independence Day parade in Boquette, an awesome mountain town close to Costa Rica.

Pawn shop blues

I’ve gotten a lot of great feedback from my postings. The typical response goes something like this: “Bram, I hate you. While we’re slaving away, stuck in our cubicle cages, you’re living the life on Rotary’s dime. How can I a) join your cult of lazy non-wage earners? and b) sign up for your newsletter? By the way, did I tell you that I hate you?” Thanks, guys. I was really touched.

Well, it’s not all fun and tomfoolery. For example, after my weekly shave today, I had to help my roomies de-filth-ify our apartment. Bathroom duty, I guess, is the obligatory rookie chore. No harm done, except that the last time it was cleaned was when they broke in the last rookie, about a year or so ago.

We deep cleaned the whole joint, which gets pretty filthy since we leave the windows and balcony door open all the time. The Pacific breeze that sweeps through the whole apartment is something I’ll definitely miss. From the roof, I can catch a glimpse of the ocean.

We don’t even close the windows when we leave. It’s great but can really jack up the air conditioning bill…oh, wait…the breeze is our A/C. Fortunately, nobody can break in with all the bars on the windows, but I sometimes feel like I live in a pawn shop.

With everything wide open and us living on a lively road, the noise can be deafening. I think in order to qualify to live on my street, you need to have at least one crying baby, an over-protective 5-lb Yorkie or a combo of the above.

Most Latin ears seem to be acclimated to the noise pollution. They're just so use to it that even in normal conversation, they sometimes over-compensate. For the first couple weeks, I thought my roommates were always angry at me. I eventually learned that they didn't hate me - they shout their thoughts to everybody. It took me a while to get accustomed to these Venezuelans screaming a buenos dias to me.

weekend with the Chinese family

Because November is independence month (it coincides with Panama’s independence from the yoke of both Spain and Colombia’s rule), Brammy has had a lot of days off. One extended weekend, my roomies and I crammed into one of their girlfriend’s little SUV and headed 8 hours to her family’s farm in Chiriqui, on the Costa Rican border.

Chiriqui is pretty interesting. The people there possess a strong regional pride and consider themselves Chiricanos first, Panamanians second. They’ve even gone to the extent of making Chiricano passports. But somehow, I don’t think it will get you through immigration.

The area is known having the highest point in Panama – atop the Baru volcano. It’s pretty mountainous and has some of the best white water rafting and real-estate opportunities for foreigners, which is becoming somewhat of a booming industry there.

None of that mattered to me because I was intent on milking my first cow….and then having a baby calf suck on my fingers.

The weekend was a strange one. I stayed with about 30 Panamanians who were all of Chinese descent. The girlfriend’s family came over to Panama years ago, like many Chinese to work on the railroad that connected the Pacific to the Atlantic and later, to help dig out this hemisphere’s biggest functional ditch, the canal.

Her grandmother was amazing - at 89 years old, she was sharp and witty – a lot sharper than me. I couldn’t learn the Chinese she kept trying to teach me. She traversed the Pacific a good 10 years before her husband could make the trip. Talk about patience and commitment. She won the Panamanian lottery about 30 years ago. It’s a cool story: she owned a store where she’d let a lady sell lotto tickets in front. By 11:30am on ball-drop day, she still hadn’t sold all of her tickets for the noon show. She begged and pleaded and finally convinced the grandma to buy her remaining 100 tickets – one of them was good for the jackpot.

With the money, she bought a huge parcel of land with amazing views. At night, you can see the lights flashing of the Costa Rican boarder from the porch. The family built three ranches and a functional farm. Every weekend, the whole extended family heads up there for a little R&R.

I loved the cultural immersion, but I couldn’t get over this huge Chinese family speaking perfect Spanish. Some cultural stereotypes definitely fit – they were killer ping pong players. I held my own for us Americans, but was useless against their magical spin attack.

Rice juice and pineapple - together at last

I don’t think I mentioned, but the Rotary scholarship goes towards a(nother) masters degree. I’m attending ULACIT, part of the Laureate University system, for an MBA with an emphasis in HR. It’s a private school with the coldest air conditioning south of Texas. It’s such a meat locker, I wear my only long sleeved shirt to class. I love it. Sometimes, I just hang out there to soak up the cool air.

The selection process was pretty rigorous. It came down to the only school that responded to my emails and phone calls! I actually had a Guatemalan friend try to get the national university to send me an application and entrance requirements. I’m still waiting for them.

Thank the Lawd that I had an awesome adviser who hooked me up with my roommates and kept my spot, even though I couldn’t pay tuition until two days before classes started. She was great and even chaperoned me to class the first day.

By the way, anybody who comes to visit me gets to eat the finest chicken wings this country has to offer – prepared by the festive and fiery university cook, Lupe. We’ll wash it down with some of their rice/pineapple juice concoction. Free refills if you flirt with the cashier. It’s seriously the best fruit and starch pairing I’ve ever had.

Special Ed

I’m taking four classes that meet Monday and Tuesday. They’re not incredibly challenging, but are perfect for me and my less-than-perfect Spanish. I’ve got this one professor who’s a blatant side-talker. He always speaks out of one side of his mouth. I can only assume that half of what he wants to say is caught in the other side of his jaw. It’s like he’s kidnapped the important syllables for ransom. The whole time I’m thinking, “Set them free. Let those poor syllables frolic happily with the others.”

The professor loves picking on me. I think it’s because he asked me where I was from on the first day, and I swore up and down I was Panamanian. “I’m from the coast, it’s such a remote village that the only language we learned was English from the satellite feed of Good Times – Panama is Dy-no-mite!” I got a good laugh out of it, but am paying for it now.

I admitted to a classmate under the strictest of confidentiality that I couldn’t understand a damn word the professor said – and he confided that he couldn’t either! I can tell this is a grade I won’t be able to show mom.

In another class, I had to deliver a speech in my second week off the cuff. Man, the nervousness butchered my grammar even more that usual. I felt like Borat – You like!

Anybody who knows me really well, knows that I talk with my hands when giving a presentation. Sometimes it’s not so bad – others it’s like I’m chopping onions mid-air. Well, arms-a-flailing like I was kung-fu fighting, I wrapped up a well-intentioned presentation on what I thought was the tourism industry in Panama.

Either they didn’t want to bruise my fragile ego or they felt bad for me, but they clapped when I was all done. Because I’m practically the only pasty white foreigner in the school, I felt like such a novelty act. I should have passed around a hat for tips.

Can't a gringo get some sleep?

I’ve recently had to adjust my sleep schedule to accommodate the guys remodeling their apartment above us. I swear they start hammering away at 5 am. If it’s not them disturbing my beauty rest, it’s the giant cash cleaner that they’re building across the street (Panama is one of the top countries to launder money and is a major drug-transit country – much of the investment in new buildings comes from dirty money http://www.thepanamanews.com/pn/v_12/issue_05/business_01.html ). The workers play this game where they take the biggest piece of scrap metal and throw it down the metal trash chute into the giant metal dumpster 20 stories below. The worker who wakes up the most neighbors wins. It’s the equivalent of nails on 200-ft chalkboard, amplified.

Sexism or just good advertising? You decide.

This is an actual billboard here.



It's shameful, really: the blatant use of real nice timepieces to sell sex. Don't those Panamanians know that sex sells itself?