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Bits and Pieces - May 17, 2023 -Panama City

MaryBea Gallagher

• 8 min read
Bits and Pieces - May 17, 2023 -Panama City
This is the morning view from our 14th-floor hotel room so you can compare it to our night view, where the spikey towers in the distance look much more prominent, lit for the air traffic. The park down below is practically vacant during the day - the temperature when I took this was 91 degrees and the humidity was high enough that Miguel's phone told him it "felt like 104". No kids on the jungle gym, few people on the park benches - little activity that isn't absolutely necessary until after 5:00/17:00 just before twilight and sunset at 6:30/18:30.

Hello again from Panama City!  Today provided an interesting display of red tape and sitting in government offices.  We were advised by the Panama Relocation Tours people to hire a "fixer" concierge to lead us through the process at the Panamanian Federal Tribunal Electoral building and tomorrow at the US Embassy to co-ordinate the acquisition of our cedula/Panamanian ID (today) and driver's license credentials (tomorrow) as they are entwined.  For example, a number given to us during the cedula process is needed for the driver's license certification. The likelihood of a match-up and speedy processing is low without the two matching.  Therefore, you do these things in order, ensure that the numbers match, and ensure that you have a fixer to keep your form fields co-ordinated, or lost paperwork could well mean that the driver's licenses might never meet the road!  

Zu (aka Zuista) and her father are the recommended concierges in Panama City, and they do not just provide guidance through government services like visas and passport renewals, cedulas, and driver's license credentialing, but they also organize city tours, shopping trips, tours to special museum showings and all those things you dream about doing on your perfect stop in Panama City.  Zu has a staff - she may not be the person who escorts you to the upscale mall or the medical tourism clinic for your plastic surgery, but she makes sure that all goes smoothly and does most of the government process guidance.    

Today, we spent the morning in her company at the Panamanian Tribunal building ($120), as did another couple, and tomorrow, we will move on to the US Embassy, where we will spend the morning with her father ($117).  Money well spent, we quickly learned as we bypassed long lines, and Zu went directly to supervisors when grumpy clerks did not process our applications but sat staring at the ceiling.

This is just one of five Tribunal Electoral buildings on the Federal Tribunal campus everyone goes to for the functions required to sign up for services like voting, marriage licenses, disability benefits, Panamanian passports, and on and on and on. We could have gotten lost just looking for the correct building, let alone trying to find the right location within any given building. Fixer concierges are a good thing!
Miguel and I waited for Zu at the correct Panamanian Tribunal Electoral building based on the address she told us to give to our Uber driver (and it worked!). The morning was windy, but Miguel had hair gel. This is the selfie we sent to Zu so she could find us in the large mall-type open area.

Fruit of the Day - Pitaya/Pitahaya, or dragonfruit:  

Dragonfruit, or pitaya, are desert cactus fruits common in southern Mexico and the coastal regions of Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Guatemala. The dragonfruit's name comes from the scaly skin on the exterior. Wait until you see the inside! They are rare in northern Panama on the coast, so if found here, they usually come from Costa Rica. These were at Miguel's favorite fruit juice stand, and she didn't know where her fruit vendor got them, just that they were a treat for her to offer.
Whew! Look at that color! The inside is even brighter than the outside - one of those colors I want to touch, then lick my fingers to believe!
Throw it in a blender with some ice, a bit of honey or some sugar, and just enough water to make it liquid, and you have a luscious, sweet drink that any six-year-old will fight you for just because the color is so amazing! Plus, your tongue will be that color of pink for hours, so the whole world will know you had a dragon-fruit/pitaya smoothie!

Gated Communitito:

We now officially live in a gated community of five homes.  We have had an electronic gate since we moved in, as does the house next door, and there is a set of three townhouses across the property that also share an electronic gate, but I didn't think of it as a community until this month.  Two things happened.

Part 1:  Our landlords, Jorge and Luly, realized that renting out the other houses as short-term rentals was too much work, and the sporadic rentals made it harder to count on the income during the low season.  They took out a sizeable building loan in 2021 to build the three townhouses on the other side of the property. During the pandemic, the government slowed the collection of all home mortgages and building loans, which was a good thing all around - but those benefits ended in April, and this change has hit people suddenly and hard; we have seen the effects with Jorge and Luly, and also Ameth's family farm in Porton.  So, during April, Jorge and Luly set about finding long-term renters for the other four houses on the property.  In the Boquete area, where the average Panamanian income is well under $1000 per month,  finding renters for the sizeable houses means that these pretty much need to be foreigners, and ones that can afford rents of $1500 - $1600 a month (for 3-4 bedrooms), something that many ex-pats come to Panama to escape.  

Because Jorge and Luly do not speak English comfortably, and their daughter who does is in her final year of University, Miguel has undertaken the translating of tour questions and interviews.  An interesting side-effect is that it has become important to Jorge that the new renters are open to being a community with us and that we feel they would be good neighbors just as much as he feels they would be good renters.  There are no renter protection laws here as there are in Seattle - this is more an effort on Jorge's part to have a peaceful community of good people who work together to solve problems and help each other.  I didn't really expect that.

This is the entrance to the townhouse side - newly built at the end of 2022; they first rented in January as weekend and holiday rentals. The townhouses have 4 bedrooms on two floors and a second-floor balcony with a view across the landscape and into the mountains to the south and the east. Lucia is the daughter of Jorge and Luly, and Santa Lucia is Jorge's favorite saint.

So far, two are rented in addition to ours:  

    Next door to us, Valery and Ed will be moving in on June 11.  Valery is 55 and a Reiki therapist; Ed is 71 and retired, and they moved to Panama in the past year from New Jersey.  They look forward to having the space which can incorporate her Reiki studio, being at the edge of town and not in the mountain highlands, and not having the jungle bugs to deal with daily.  

     Bart will be moving into one of the townhouses on July 1; he is an engineer who moved from Florida to Panama last August and is 71.  He now lives in a one-bedroom apartment below a popular eatery and brewery and is looking forward to a quieter life in a larger space.  He goes hiking several times a week and enjoys collecting words in Spanish via DuoLingo that he hopes to make into sentences one day; Miguel promised to help, and Ameth is hoping for another helper to trade English for Spanish.

The first-floor terrace for the townhouses (this one is Bart's) comes with a hammock, rocking chairs, a swing set, and flowers!

    We have put out notices on a couple of ex-pat Facebook pages, concierge services, and other notice boards letting people know that we are building a small community with two more places to rent, as we don't want to scare anyone away (namely Bart) if Jorge and Luly have to return to the weekend party rentals to make the loan payments because the last two townhouses don't lease soon enough!

Part 2 of the gated community is an enhanced gate for Miguel: Jorge sent Ameth over to weld on extensions to the front gate so that the little dog that used to squeeze under couldn't enter and flaunt his presence by pooping all over the yard, principally where Miguel was going to step next.  I thought you would get a kick out of the extent that Jorge and Ameth went to make Miguel happy since he is helping to win and woo the new renters.

Note the gradated extensions to the gate poles on the left side so that the little dog from down the street that runs around off-leash cannot squeeze under the gate and poop all over the yard. Jorge had Ameth do this while Miguel was away in Panama City, meeting friends from Ecuador, so he would be surprised and pleased upon his return - it worked! That dog knew just where Miguel would be stepping next!

Flower of the Day:  Globe Amaranth

While enjoying the brilliance of the pink pitaya/dragonfruit, I wanted you to see the same color in this globe amaranth, which is all over the place. This must be the color of the season! The color is so intense it almost overwhelms the iPhone's camera - it blushes boldly.

Tomorrow is our day at the US Embassy.  I will report tomorrow evening on how the day went and bring you another flower of the day!

Thank you for the lovely time!

MaryBea y Miguel

How to find us:

Replies to blog postings via email: If you hit "reply" to this email and get a "no reply" address, use the x to knock it out, type in MaryBeaGallagher@gmail.com, and I will get your response.  Quirky.

Email: Use our Gmail accounts for email - for some reason, my Comcast/Xfinity doesn't work consistently in Central America.

MaryBeaGallagher@gmail.com

MiguelGiacomo@gmail.com

WhatsApp is the best route for texts and voice calls, but it is uncertain for video calls.  We are officially in the Outback of Panama now, in a valley with mountains and extinct volcanos around, and the added interference of lightning and thunderstorms in the afternoons, so there are periods where transmissions will not get through.  Find WhatsApp for your phone or computer at your favorite App Store.

Phone calls:  In theory, our phones can connect, but the reality is that usually, it rings once, and then a voicemail transcription shows up, and sometimes it never rings, and a voicemail transcription shows up days later.  Don't trust it.  If you try and we don't pick up, we probably aren't seeing or hearing it ring.  If you don't use WhatsApp, stick to email as more likely to get through.  We are in the outback and reliant on many factors that may not all align.

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