September 14th, 2007

The shed was finished this week, except for some final painting. The local tradition, when the roof goes on a building, is for the owner to provide the workers with beer and mondongo (tripe). After advice from our friends here, we decided to forego the mondongo and give the workers beer and money ($5 each). The workers didn't seem to miss the mondongo at all.

While in Panama City earlier this week, we found more wonderful grocery stores. I say tell everyone:I haven't done any site seeing in Panama City but I know every grocery store in the city. These last two were J ewish delis (have found three so far), with a great vegetable selection. Also, from our hotel in Panama City, I can walk to New York Bagels and treat ourselves to great lox and bagels, along with buying bagels to bring home.

The ship with our household goods had to divert itself to other ports in order to avoid the hurricanes in the Atlantic. Instead of the promised 3 September arrival, the ship is now schedule for 17 September. Unfortunately for the import agents, they forgot to inform us of the missed arrival date so we had a one-sided, unhappy conversation with them. We are now getting regular status reports. Once the ship docks, it will be another week before we get our stuff, due to customs procedures. We are now expecting our stuff to be delivered to our house around the 24th of September, just when we have visitors. Naturally.

Speaking of visitors: Nigel and Gill from Portugal and Donald and Sarah from the US are arriving in Panama City on Saturday the 22nd. We plan to go meet them, spend a couple of days there, and then come up here for a couple of days. Tommy's birthday is on 25 September. One of the best restaurants in Panama in here in El Valle, so we will be going there for the birthday dinner. For all our foodie friends: "best" in Panama is probably at "B" elsewhere. Still good, though.

The little local library is so neat, and is funded by contributions from the wealthy Panamaians who have weekend houses here. The library has a small, but certainly adequate, English language section. On Saturday mornings, several volunteers teach English classes to the school age kids. I went a couple of weeks ago, to show one class the magic of Google Earth, which fascinated everyone in the library. A big favorite was Disneyland.

The library also shows movies, via DVDs. On Friday nights, the movies are in English with Spanish subtitles; the reverse happens on Saturday nights. We like this little event! Some weeks the movies are good and some weeks they are bad. Some weeks we get surprised, like last week when the advertised movie, "The Holiday", was replaced with some awful Jackie Chan crapola. One of our friends walked out as soon as we confirmed the replacement; he gets the smart guy award.

I think I mentioned that I was teaching myself to make paper, using our household's recycled paper. My efforts were okay but not great. Luckily, one of our new friends here is a papermaker, using plant material. She had me over for a papermaking session; what fun and I learned alot. And what a mess we made.

The weekends here are lots of fun, with more stores open and with lots more energy in the town. The market, which is famous throughout Panama, has much nicer produce on the weekend, and there are more artists/craftspeople selling their stuff. The pottery pot man is also here on the weekends, and we have lots of his pots and saucers. There are several pottery places along the road up to El Valle; one of them has large pots similar to the ones Cynthia gave us for our Portuguese house. We had to leave those big pots in Portugal, and will replace them with ones from one of those pottery stands.

There was a big drama here two weeks ago: a fairly influential couple from the US was vacationing up here, staying at one of the fancy hotels. The guy of the couple decided to go walking on one of the mountains; when he didn't return within the expected time, his wife notified the hotel owners who started mobilizing search teams, some volunteer and some paid. This poor guy was found two days later (!) by the local Indians, who made a basic stretcher to lift him out and carry him down the mountain to the waiting ambulance. Apparently this couple has enough influence to get Jimmy Carter called President Torrijos (of Panama) to ask him to ask the US to send helicopters (the US stated policy is to not send helicopters unless requested by the host nation...except when it suits them otherwise). Panama didn't request US help, but it didn't matter because the mountain is so steep and jungley that there is no place for a helicopter to land (the Panamanian rescue service did send a helicopter but it couldn't land). Anyway, the guy had at least one fractured leg (some stories say two legs and an arm were broken), was taken to a hospital in Panama City, and is okay now.

I just went outside to close the gate and the frogs are talking! El Valle is home to the golden frog, in case you didn't know. I don't know if the ones I hear are the famous golden guys, but they sure are making noise!

Talk to you later!