Panama Scouting - Day 10 - Tour of Panama - Day 1

Hello from the beach!  

Tonight we are staying in an all-inclusive resort on the Pacific Coast beach near Coronado, a town built in the past 20 years to provide a Pacific beachside locale for ex-pats and a weekend get-away for moneyed Panamanians.  All beaches are public in Panama, but many hotels are built tall and right on that public beach.  This resort is only 9 stories, but as you can see in the distance, Coronado has (currently) three condo buildings over 40 stories high, right on the beach.  Heaven forbid the ocean should rise with the ice caps melting!  This particular gated community has homes, condos, the resort, and two golf courses, in case you get too good at one of them.  Our all-inclusive one-night stay started at about 3:00 pm with our tour bus stop and being served fruit drinks as we waited in line for our check-in.  

We were lucky to have a special check-in line just for the tour because the other Saturday arrivals were stretched out for more than 100 people - though they did get served fruit drinks while they waited on the hard tile floors.  Dinner tonight was great, and now the bulk of the people are dancing to live music near pool #1, and drinking the free liquor.  I am writing you, and Miguel is catching up on his reading of Dante's Divine Comedy about the seven circles of hell.

This morning, a lawyer met our group at the MultiPlex hotel after an early breakfast and talked about the Pensionado visa and the Friendly Nations visa - what they are, what is required, how to get the paperwork together, how to choose a lawyer to walk you through the process, and what the process entails.  In general, the Pensionado visa is pretty easy - you have to have a pension (social security counts) of at least $1000 per month for a single person and $1250 for a couple, and you have to agree to not work in Panama, and therefore, not take a job that a Panamanian could hold - even a part-time job.  The main requirement in paperwork is proof of pension/income, an FBI report saying you are "clean", and approval along the process (apostille, similar to notarization, but by a Panamanian consulate) of the paperwork within the 6 months prior to your arrival to get your residency. While you cannot work in Panama if you have this visa, you can make money over the internet, or through foreign sources outside of Panama - so eBay is fine.

The friendly nations visa has many more requirements.  You have to have a job with a company in Panama, OR invest $200,000 in real estate, OR place $200,000 in a trust for 3 years in Panama, OR start a business expected to employ Panamanians within 6 months of opening, and invest $200,000 in that business.  On top of those rather expensive requirements, the visa lasts 2 years, at which time you have to start the whole visa process again, though, after your third year of residency, you can request a change to permanent residency and take your money out of the bank if you want.  

You can see the need for a knowledgeable lawyer to guide you through.  Panama changes the laws, such as the $200,000 is a 2020 addition, so you need someone who is going to keep up, and also keep you (and themselves) out of trouble.

After chatting with the lawyer, we drove west along the coast and lunched at a restaurant called La Ruines - a re-build of a very old taverna that an ex-soldier at the USA base at the Canal and his Panamanian wife have built over the past ten years.  The food was excellent, the family was delightful (their three teenage and twenty-something children were the waiters), and they shared their thoughts on living in Panama, learning a different culture, and what they have seen as vital "successful attributes" of the many ex-pats who live in the area and visit their bar and restaurant.

We then made a field trip to a large grocery store ion Coronado - El Machetazo - to see grocery prices and compare the prices of brands we see in the USA to brands known well around Latin America.  USA brands are predictably more expensive, but you also have to keep your phone handy to do the conversion from pounds and ounces in the US to metric measures in Panama.  Fruit and vegetables are mostly coming from Boquete, the breadbasket of Panama, and prices for local produce are less than in Seattle stores.  Getting Miguel out of his hyper-brand-conscious mindset (no generics) will be a requirement before we would save any money on food, except for fruit and vegetables.  One funny thing is that tiny red delicious apples from Washington were on sale for $4 per pound - cute, but I am so apple-snobbish as a Washington native that I couldn't figure out why even export red delicious, and a three-bite apple is hardly worth the effort.  Another surprise was that there were lots of frozen Atlantic salmon fillets for sale at about $15 per kilogram, which is just under two pounds.  Once again, my salmon snobbishness produced an "ATLANTIC salmon!!!" guffaw, but on the other hand, $8-$9 per pound is pretty good for a place where no salmon naturally occur!  The cost of Oreos is do-able with an 8-cookie snack pack for $0.65, and I got a KitKat bar for $0.54.  I think we can make this work.

I can tell by the music and the raucous laughter outside that everyone has been drinking since 4:00 pm (now 10:00 pm), so I am going to pull up my Kindle and escape into a good book.  We are back on the road tomorrow at 8:45, and we will move further up the Pacific coast before turning right and heading into the mountains on Monday.

Adios and Buenas Noches until tomorrow!
Mary Bea y Miguel