IT'S ALL ABOUT THE EXPERIENCE (really?), AND MAKING TIME FOR SOME VOLUNTEERING

I just can't write it enough that the days just go by here.  And while there are some plans made, everyone is usually so relaxed and flexible (still getting used to the relaxed part), plans can get changed, rearranged, extended, and it just makes the day that much more interesting!  When a week starts out quiet and, dare I say, slow, it usually finishes up with me thinking "what just happened these past few days"!  And I also think, why didn't I write about the boring stuff first, so I wouldn't have so much more to post when it gets busy!  This will be a grab a cup of coffee or two post to read--or break it up into days.

I will start with the quiet day of Monday.  Mondays were always the dreadful day.  Sunday nights went by too quickly, with me not looking forward to starting the work week again.  When I changed jobs in 2006, I didn't particularly embrace the change.  It was a difficult office to work in, when I had worked in a pleasant one for sixteen years and really enjoyed my job.  But time went on and gradually things got better with a change in staff, change in employers, change in environment, and then, Mondays weren't so bad anymore.  In Panama and with retirement, these days run into each other, and now I mostly know that Monday means going to the gym.  The gym is closed on Saturdays and Sundays.  No real happy hours planned in the area on Sundays and Mondays.  Many stores are closed Mondays here.  Many restaurants are closed on Mondays and Tuesdays.  This past Monday I went to the gym by myself (this is being written way too often--the "by myself" part), and at some point, Ray and I took a drive west to Santa Clara beach.  I wanted to find the beach we went to two years ago with my sister and my nephew.  I wanted to find the restaurant that I had read is nearby where you can park, rent a palapa, take a shower, change and eat as well.  We found the beach, we found the place that we had spent $3 to park at the time we spent a few hours there, and we found the restaurant.  Perfect.  The restaurant charges $3 for all of the above (needless to say, we were probably "gringoed" two years ago for parking in the wrong area and paying most likely $3/person).  After driving and discovering other side roads and developments, we stopped at the bakery in San Carlos (next to the produce market) and had ice cream.  Our choices of flavors were vanilla, chocolate, strawberry and what looked like chocolate chip.  It turned out it was "galleta" meaning cookie or for this, cookies and cream.   I love that Ray and I have learned quite a bit of vocabulary in the short time we have lived in Panama.  One creamy, delicious scoop in a cup is .85.

Bakery has cookies, cakes, and a lot of delicious looking breads

Mi helado!

We sat in the open air bakery at the booth people watching haha

Across the street from the bakery, there is a store with resin chairs, appliances, bras, and the usual things you find in a Panamanian store.  Next door there is a Chino.  The small appliance, lingerie and garden store had a man sitting in a resin chair at the entrance.  He welcomed us, shook our hands and followed us around his store.  We told him we were "just looking" which is the phrase we have used the most (thank you to our Spanish teacher), since our arrival here.  He then showed Ray, on his smart phone, his property he had for sale along a river.  And he gave Ray his telephone number in case we ever needed his help.  This is what we thought he was telling Ray.  I casually walked the store avoiding the whole conversation but occasionally listening.

Back at the gym by myself on Tuesday, I came home to Ray making some plans for the day.  Too bad I can't remember what they were, except I do know we were going to go to Leonardos for a late lunch.  Leonardos was too warm (the AC was on, but it wasn't sufficient for me to sit there and eat lunch).  We walked over to Don Lee's for Chinese food.  Don Lee is a fast food Chinese restaurant.  Dim Sum is also offered, but we chose standard chicken and vegetables along with fried rice.  My chicken was boneless, thankfully.  My meal was good, but El Machetazo Cafe is better.  And so are many other places in the area.  The meals come in boxes, since Don Lee is a delivery restaurant as well (they deliver on motorcycles).

Tuesday night we had plans to go to La Teca for happy hour.  There wasn't a posted event through the community, so we had a feeling it would be a quiet night.  And early on, it was slow.  Ray and I chatted with the bartender while he made our Sangria.  We talked about the normal things I would talk to a bartender about--the prostitutes in Panama City.  Our friends, Greg and Thea, joined us at the bar as did Mark and Jackie.  It turns out Mark is a reviewer for the playacommunity paper, and he reviews wine and golf courses.  His wife his President of the Rotary Club.  The six of us had lots to talk about now that I wasn't learning about the prostitutes of Panama City.  Mark was going to be at an upcoming wine event that we would be going to, also.  He shared information about the festival, such as "get there when it starts".  Good to know!  The restaurant was busier than I had seen before with several tables in the restaurant filling up, but Ray and I chose not to have dinner there.  At the end of happy hour, we went to Leonardos.  Ray wanted chicken tenders and french fries, so we split a meal--and the air conditioning was on full blast.

It was a very early Wednesday morning!  We drove Clyde and Terry to the airport.  We picked them up at their house at five am.  Now the day before, traffic was at a standstill due to a bus driver strike and a fatal hit and run, so Clyde wanted to give himself plenty of time for their flight.  I don't blame him one bit.  In November, we have decided to have Clyde and Terry drive us into the city the night before our flight, since our flight leaves very early.  While in the city, we wanted to get our placa, or license plate.  It can take ninety minutes to get to the airport, or it can take up to three hours or more.  On Wednesday, it took almost three hours.  No worries though.  Plenty of time was allotted.  Whew.  And we got our placa!  It took no more than five minutes, and the only reason it took that long was because we had the white receipt in hand and needed the pink one.  Of course.  Ray ran to the car in the parking lot down the hill to get the right receipt.   In Panama, we have to get an annual inspection (revisado) and then change our license plate, also.  The number stays the same.  We are given the entire plate, and not just a sticker to change like we do in the States.  The bottom plate is our brand new one.

While in the city, we decided we would shop in stores just "looking around", and then we went to Westland Mall.  I wanted to see the movie "Gone Girl", and I wanted to try on that darn sundress I had seen six weeks ago.  The movie was playing at 1:45 at Albrook Mall.  We had not had breakfast or lunch yet, but with the movie fast approaching, we knew popcorn would be lunch, and then we would eat a better dinner.  We wouldn't eat at Carl's fast food restaurant this time.  We would find a restaurant to try on the way back to Chame.  Once at the mall, we found the theater without a problem (this mall is the eleventh largest mall in the world).  Where to get the tickets though?  Oh, right.  We had to go downstairs where we had just come from to buy the tickets.  It wasn't playing at 1:45.  It was only playing at 10:00.  We knew it was playing at Westland Mall at close to 3:00, so we drove to Westland Mall (which is on our way to Chame).  We decided to first get our tickets, and then we would get a late lunch.  And I could still try on that sundress there.  The movie was not playing.  It showed on the website, it showed on the the synopsis at the theater, but it wasn't in poster form on the wall.  The time wasn't displayed.  Of course it wasn't.  We ate at Carl's and had frozen yogurt.  And I did try on that sundress.  I even showed it to Ray outside of the dressing room.  It was a good laugh.  It was floral (think Jan Brady from the seventies), colorful, and "slimming".  Snug.  Short.  A perfectly good fit for it being Size Large.  It was only $5.99.  Even the salesgirl was smiling (laughing with me I am sure, and not at me).  It went back on the rack.  And we drove back to Chame without seeing a movie, without eating caramel popcorn and without me buying a new sundress.

Once at Casa Cuarenta, we decided to share our day with neighbors, Gus and Adele.  Another neighbor, Juan, was visiting, and we met him.  We have seen him bring Gus and Adele meals daily.  He lives up the street and next door to his brother.  He is a pilot for the boats entering the canal.  Adele yells at Gus to speak to us in Spanish, and this way she knows what we are saying...sort of.  Juan commented that we had a great vocabulary base as well for the short time we have been in Panama.  And that was the day.  A long one with a super early start, a frustrating one, but as usual, this is Panama and anything goes.

Is it Thursday already!?  Big fun planned for the next few days!  Thursday was the XVI Gran Feria de Vinos in Panama City.  An annual wine festival at the Riu Grande Hotel with sixty wineries and a possibility of tasting three hundred wines.  It was a two day event, but we chose to go on Thursday and spending the night at the Hotel Las Vegas.  Our jubilado discount made the rate for a king suite $55.  Bargain!  We had told Greg and Thea about the event, and they not only decided to join us, but they also stayed at the Hotel Las Vegas.  Put into perspective, the Rui Grande where the event was being held would cost us $150 with our discount, and our usual Marriott stay would have been about $120.  When with Clyde and Terry after our day in San Blas, we found the Hotel Las Vegas to be clean and friendly, and the location can't be beat, so this is why we stayed there.  At eleven am, we drove up to Coronado where we picked up newly named for this part of the blog, Thurston and Lovely. By the way, I did not select these names, but I am going with it, because "Thurston" took the time while sipping wine to select blog code names.  It was to be a wonderful, busy and mostly unplanned (who have I become!) next few days drinking wine, shopping in the city, and dining with this couple.  Once we arrived to the city, we ate lunch at the Pomodoro Italian restaurant.  It is a favorite restaurant of our friend, Clyde, and it has become one of our favorites, too.  It is also attached to the hotel, so it was easy.

Eating lunch with Lovey and Thurston

 We checked into the hotel and took a cab to the Riu Grande.  For four hours, we tasted red, white, and sparkling wines.  We grazed on ham, chicken sandwiches, mini-quiche, pretzels, sausage, red salmon caviar (which I now know is a substitute for the more expensive sturgeon caviar--which was also offered, but the red was prettier.  However, I do not like it at all!), truffle pate, bread, cheese, crackers and chips.  The food was in all four corners of the conference room, and it was also being passed around.  We tried 58 wines from 24 wineries.  If you know me, you know I counted them.  We visited Argentina, France, Spain, Chile, and the US (California).  We enjoyed tastings from  $5 bottles, $102 bottles and in between.  We met with friends from Coronado as well as Mark and Jackie.  It was a enjoyable and fun night spent with Thurston and Lovey, and we topped it off with dessert of oreo cheesecake, molten chocolate cake and coffee back at Pomodoro.  Ray and I walked over to the Venato to play penny slots and people watch haha (many ladies of the night hanging around the casino).  We lost $10 and called it another fulfilling day!

Not too crowded, yet.

Fills up--lots to see and sample!

Caviar and pate.

Back in the room.

 After breakfast at the hotel and being in the city, we knew we had a day ahead of us--shopping!  Lovey and Thurston had not been to the Discovery Center (Lovely discovered a whole lot while Thurston and Ray shopped circles around us).  Ray and I found a few things we needed such as two hair clips for me, and I found it amusing that the bar code from the packaging was removed and put in a bin near the cash register.  I guess I won't be returning the hair clips.  We made our way to PriceSmart, and after we shopped for more there, we decided to have lunch.  This is where it gets a tad. bit. frustrating.  One of us should have stood on line early on in the day, placed the order, and waited on another line.  The chaos ensues at PriceSmart.  There is no order or making any sense of how things are done.  Okay, it makes sense to them.  Ray and Thurston get a table.  Lucky them.  They sit down.  Lovey and I stand on a long line.  We place our order.  There is one cashier taking orders.  Our receipt gets tossed to the bottom of the pile.  I tell the cashier my name is "Al" to simplify things.  I spell it out in Spanish (which is "Ah, el-lay").  She repeats it back, and somehow I end up being Helen.  (Sounds like "El-lay" which is what she said back to me after my spelling of "Al".). We then stand and wait while one woman puts each order together.  First, she has to wipe a cafeteria tray off.  Then she gets the food, and then she hollers out the name.   We put our ketchup, napkins, drinks, and other miscellaneous things on the table.  Thurston joins me for "the experience".  A second cashier starts taking orders, so now the orders are piling up even more, and one person is still filling the trays.  We finally get food.  We accidentally grab someone else's hotdog.  Ooops.  Did I mention chaos?  After peacefully eating a PriceSmart lunch of pizza, fries, ice cream, and hot dogs, we make our way to El Mec.  El Mec is a home improvement store, not to the extent of Home Depot though.  It has sinks, faucets, toilets, flooring, showers, tubs, and a whole lot more.  Our friends are looking at doing some remodeling possibly and wanted to visit the larger El Mec.  The one near our house in Coronado does not have a lot to choose from, and it isn't a large showroom.  After walking this store, we drove out of the city to Westland Mall.  Lovey was looking to buy shoes for our trip to Boquete this week.  She wanted more of a hiking shoe, and she didn't bring the one's she has to Panama.  Once at Westland Mall, she also wanted to find some shirts.  She found the shoes, but like me on my first trip shopping in Panama, she too was dismayed and disturbed.  Where do Panamanians shop for clothing that fits them?  Many are petite and large (pear shaped), so we don't understand how they shop here.  Since they hadn't been to Albrook Mall (which I didn't realize, and why we didn't go there in the first place no one knew except we were trying to get out of the city at a decent hour on a Friday night), we promised ourselves a good dinner at Pollo Tropical and a successful trip to Dorians clothing store.  We had a good dinner.  It was a great dinner of chicken, salad, black beans and rice.  Lovey and Thurston have dined at this restaurant in the States, and they were happy we enjoyed it as much as they do.  It was delicious.  Back to shopping,  Ray and Thurston found clothing to buy that fit them.  Lovey and I walked away empty handed.  Dorians, the department store, was a disappointment this time.  The racks were a mess, the clothes were thrown everywhere, the store was crowded (it was a pay week with an extra check thrown in there), and it was the end of the day.  When driving back to Coronado, we passed another 18-wheeler tractor trailer that had crashed in the median around the mountainous hill.  There was a little outgoing traffic like we are used to in Virginia at the end of a week, but we made it to Coronado safely albeit wiped out.

Making and selling paella at PriceSmart.  Too bad there was shrimp in it (allergic to this).

Why did I decide to volunteer a double shift yesterday?  It had been a long Friday, but what else was I going to do on Saturday?  It just so happened that last week I decided I would help the children at Finca La Maya make t-shirts.  Then Starr emailed me that one of the advanced teachers would be out of the classroom on Saturday morning, and she was hoping the new volunteers could help out.  Ray opted out, but he drove me to the school.  It was decided that Thea, aka Lovey, (there is the big reveal), would then pick me up at noon, take me to lunch, and the two of us would help with the art program in the afternoon.  This was what I had originally planned for, but always keeping a second and third plan in the back of my mind.  When I arrived at the school, there were four children waiting outside on the bench.  We went into the classroom, and their teacher arrived not too long after we had had a chance to "catch up".  These younger aged children do not speak a lot of English, but I was told to encourage them.  So with my broken Spanish to help them along with speaking mostly English, and their broken English, we shared stories of our past week (sort of).  Once Julio, the teacher I met two weeks ago, walked in, the class I was to help in got started, and there were six students this time.  The students were ages eleven to thirty-three, and for the first fifteen minutes, I spoke with a seventeen year old and a very shy eleven year old.  At noon, Starr came to the school to say hi to the students and to tell me she had lunch at the house for me and the other teachers.  I told her what my plans were, but when Thea drove up, it was decided that we stay on the farm for lunch.  And then while talking to Thea about the new lunch plans, standing outside her new car, the doors locked--with the keys in the ignition (not running though!).  Easy enough to call Ray, have him pick up Greg (aka Thurston), and they would come to the school with another set of keys after art class at three pm.  Thea and I walked to the Starr's spacious bohio, and we enjoyed sancocho soup (it is a Panamanian chicken soup that I had not tried yet), salad, rice and fresh tomatoes from Starr's garden.  We enjoyed talking with Starr and her intern (she had extended her stay), seeing her lovely home (!), and we walked back to the school.  We caught up with the children who had waited at the school to decorate their brand new shirts.

Once the students had colored their iron-on transfers (including me and Thea), Rebecca (the intern) scanned them into the computer.  We talked to Starr about future art projects, and I casually mentioned a craft fair taking place in Coronado next Saturday.  Starr had no idea there was even a fair taking place, and with school being on Saturdays, the fair only a week away, Thea took on the task of finding out if Finca La Maya can have a table at the fair with the children's art displayed and for sale.  So.  Next Saturday, if we are given space, it looks like Starr will price the items and pull all the work together this coming week,  I will volunteer in the morning OR I will help Thea load up her car with art work (OR do a little of both), and the two of us will run a table at the fair.  With that straightened out, and "planned", the T-shirts were now ready to be completed.

At the end of the day, the children (and their two happy teachers) proudly displayed their T-shirts.  And Ray brought Greg with the keys.  I should mention here that while Thea and I spend the afternoon with some very happy children decorating T-shirts, Greg had an enjoyable day watching college football, and Ray spent the day with the TV as well.

The boys loved to run around when not coloring.  

Me coloring with the children.

The kids love having pictures taken.

Looking for that perfect colored pencil.

Thea looks on and practices Spanish with the kids.  Starr admires a drawing.

Starr shows the children next weeks project.

Carefully pulling off the transfer.

Hold your breath.

Voila!

Thea works on removing a transfer.

Thea talks to one of the volunteer teachers about his wrist bands.

The first two big reveals proudly show off their art!

Adding another reveal.

Happily showing off her masterpiece.

Happy volunteers and students dressed in their new shirts!

Another day!  But wait, there's still more.  After dropping off the volunteer teacher and one of the students in the nearby town, and with Greg and Thea dropping off other students behind us, we had plans to go to Picasso restaurant later to listen to a jazz singer.  Ray and I first tried eating dinner at a new restaurant called Delicios Margot.  We pulled into the parking lot at the early hour of seven pm, and it was closed (last Saturday, it was PACKED).  Instead, we enjoyed a burger and chicken sandwich at Coronado Cafe.  We arrived to Picasso's and were told we needed reservations.  We were told that Saturdays are always crowded, and without reservations we could sit at the tables in the grassy area.  Claire, the owner, came up to give us hugs, and she sat us at a table with another couple.  It was a table for six, so we knew we would have space for Greg and Thea.  They arrived soon after.  The couple we sat with lives near Sora (in the mountains across the highway near a development called Altos del Maria).  They have lived here for three years and are originally from New Mexico.  The woman volunteers at another school in Coronado.  The singer, Carla Kjaerby, and her band, Latin Fusion, played for three hours.  While there, Ray and I met a handful of other expats (some permanently here and others testing the water), and at midnight, this girl was ready to turn into a pumpkin!

Today there is laundry to do, hair to color, showers to take, but with little water pressure right now, none of this will happen yet.  It's still early.  And tomorrow, we take a road trip west to Boquete with Greg and Thea.  There we hope to drink great coffee, zipline in the jungle, and relax in the mountains of Panama.  I am sure plans will be made, changed and rearranged which is par for the course when retiring in Panama.  I know we will have a fantastic and fulfilling four days discovering this part of the country together.  Before making the move to Panama and retiring here to partake in all of these "experiences", Ray and I were first and foremost lucky to have found Clyde and Terry through their blogwww.alongthegringotrail.blogspot.com and to be given a head start making fast friends here.  Adding to this, we feel fortunate that Greg found my blog and bothered to read it!

It's now time to check the water--so much to do!

View from Hotel Las Vegas (by Thea).