Pictures: The cruise ship out the window of my classroom, and one over looking the playground at my school. Tough when you have a cold, it is late in the week and you are tired, and you go to work and see a cruise ship out your window! Just dreaming. Also pictures of COLD Michigan with my adorable granddaughter whol loved my ipad, and my son and our newest granddaughter!
Hummm, been awhile since I have posted to the blog. Actually, it is getting difficult to find differences. I guess we are getting used to the culture, the climate, the people, so things don’t seem as strange. Panama is becoming “home” to us. BUT, we still cannot communicate in Spanish, no matter how hard we try to listen to conversations.
We had a big swim meet a couple weeks ago for our school. Lots of parents, lot of cheering, guess it wasn’t much different than if I was in the states. But, what really got me was that in spite of all the trash bins/cans sitting around, people would toss their trash on the ground. Few took the extra couple of steps to toss it into the trash can. Again, I take it this is part of the “classist” mentality. There is always someone to clean up your messes, since most everyone has a maid. In the states, you need to buy a house with a dining room for resale value; here you must have a maid’s quarters in your apartment for resale value. I still do not have a maid! I would just as soon clean my own place.
Just came back the other day after spending spring break in the states visiting family. When we left, everything was brown, large cracks in the dry ground. Coming back from the airport it was all green. The rainy season has started and it took just a week to green things up. The humidity has returned as well. However, after being gone a week and the apartment being closed up, we had very little mold, which would be common after a week during the rainy season. Anyway, I am thinking I love this weather. My skin was so dry in the states and I had to use Chap Stick constantly. Here, not a problem. Granted, you have to enjoy the humidity. But, the humidity in Panama is not the oppressive type you encounter in the Midwest during the summerComing back to the heat and humidity was welcome after being “cold” in Michigan. Why, the temperatures got down into the 30’s and 40’s. Getting home from the airport was amazing. Instead of the typical horrendous Saturday afternoon traffic, the streets were empty. Apparently, everyone had left town for Easter weekend, which is another holiday where Panamanians head to the interior to spend time with their families.
Went to the store yesterday and encountered a bad traffic jam. Discovered, as we approached it, that someone’s car had stalled. It was on a road with a slight downhill, so it would have been super simple to push the car off to the side and out of the way of the traffic. But no, who would do that??? Instead, a couple of men had their tool box out and were working under the hood right there in the middle of the road, making traffic a bigger mess than it normally is. A simple shove of the small car would have helped immensely with the traffic situation. We had another couple in the car that had lived in a number of other foreign locations and they said that repairing broken down cars in the middle of the road is very common with absolutely no concern about blocking traffic.
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