Catching up - May 16, 2023
Hello from Panama City!
I thought I would just splatter some of the exciting items of the past month, and this trip down the page for you, hopefully with enough photos to keep it interesting.
Lunch! I had a wonderful lunch in Panama City today - I told you yesterday that my ten weeks on low-interest food had heightened my fascination with even a few bites of steak dinner. Today, we flew to Panama City on an early flight and had lunch at a little restaurant near our favorite hotel. My salmon salad arrived after a luscious lentil soup and toasted bread, and I had a few bites before I took a photo for you because it was so good. It came with the soup, fresh squeezed orange juice (no acid!), toast, and a churro for dessert, all for $10. Gosh-a-roonie, it was delicious! I ate the whole darn meal and smiled so much that the waiter wrapped up two extra churros for me to take back to the hotel.
Mangoes: I told you in March that we were getting mangoes from Costa Rica and I didn't know when the local mango season was. It is now. There are mangoes all over the place in the hotter climes. For example, we visited our landlord's home in David, about 45 minutes west and 3800 feet lower in altitude, and the tree in their yard is heavily burdened with mangoes. But they are not like the mangoes we get from Costa Rica in March, and they are not like the regular mangoes we saw in Seattle, nor the "champagne" mangoes that were softer and more yellow. These are more yellow and softer, but rounder, brighter colored meat, and very sweet. They are bigger than the champaign mangoes, but smaller than the green/red Costa Rica mangoes. They are delightful, and we get them off the fruit truck at three for one dollar, or wait for the weekend, and Jorge will drop off a bag to get them out of his backyard!
Now you know when to drop by for Mango Season!
Taxi! We are in Panama City to visit the Embassy and verify our driver's licenses so that we can transfer the credentials to Panama driver's licenses and also get Panama cedulas, or permanent IDs. For most of the past 8 months, we have walked around Boquete without problems - it is only a mile from one end of town to the other. Call a taxi when you want to go further, such as to the dentist, which is about half a mile north of town and up in the hills. If you have groceries to get home, get a taxi. WE WOULD CALL A TAXI when I didn't feel good and walking a distance was an issue. Seldom more than $3 per ride, and that is the Gringo Rate we/I am happy to pay.
Boquete licenses a limited number of taxi drivers, and they work the hours that please them. Taxis are yellow and say TAXI on them - no mistaking them. There is no Uber or self-drive app services. Few taxi owners can own more than one car - it is too expensive to get into that business, and the takings per ride are too low, so there is no central dispatch service to call when you need a taxi.
How do you find a taxi? The app for every communication in Panama: WhatsApp! You make a taxi driver friend or two or seven, save their number to your phone, and call them when you need a ride. Someone from the Panama Relocation Tour's Boquete Facebook Group posted a list of taxi drivers so that we all wouldn't be entirely lost when your driver is sick today, or their car is sick today, or their daughter gets out of school early and your ice cream melting at the grocery store and cannot find a ride home.
Not having a central dispatch service is a pain in the patootie. If you have an appointment at the dentist or doctor, and you cannot find anyone available to pick you up, your blood pressure as a time-bound USA-ian will go through the roof. For that, I miss Uber. On the other hand, these guys can almost support families on what they can make as taxi drivers in a small town with 6000 ex-pats who cannot drive for at least their first 6 months, and even after that, the parking spots in town are sparse (ex: 7 parking spots at the main grocery store).
So, even though we are looking forward to buying a car and seeing places in Panama and Costa Rica that we have not yet been to, as well as being able to do our own Costco/PriceSmart runs once a month, we don't expect that car to change our week-to-week very much, and the taxi drivers will likely be an essential part of our social circle. Luckily, Ameth (property and maintenance guy extraordinaire) is a great backup who will drop everything and dash us to the doc on time if all our taxi efforts fail. Taxi!
Scarlet Passion Flower: Miguel took a drive into the mountains with Jorge (our landlord) in early April, and he brought me back three of these flowers. They are so bold and bright that he knew I would love them - and he was right! A fascinating thing about them is that they were happy in water until nightfall, and then they closed up. I thought they would open again in the morning like many Panama flowers, but no - they were done. One and done. I was reading up on them, and they are a vining flower with a very short-lived blossom that prefers to stay on the vine. So dramatic!
And that is my collection of thoughts for today. Tomorrow is our first trip to the Embassy for more paperwork, and I will toss off a few more ideas tomorrow evening when we settle in for the night.
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.
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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