lost... and found?

March 24, Boquete, Panama

(I think I´ll start adding my best language mistakes to the beginning of every post, but this time it´s at the end - and it´s a good one.)

I always get caught up, when I´m traveling, in the idea of travel writing. I want to turn every experience into a story, and then I wind up getting behind in chronicling the overall trip, like now, when it´s been 12 days since the last blog. So, here´s a little summary:

We´ve been really busy these last couple of weeks. We kind of fell into a microlife here in Boquete, Panama, and have really been enjoying it. How did we get here?

So, after Puerto Viejo and Bocas del Toro, we headed West for some good old fashioned carpe diem, and it hasn´t disappointed. We took a pretty ride over the continental divide in a minibus that stopped every fifteen feet and cost $2 for a 5 hour ride. (It´s amazing how many people there are waiting by the road in places that seem to be, otherwise, totally deserted.)

We got into David, the second largest city in the country, and the hottest place on earth. 95 degrees with 95% humidity. (Close your eyes here if you have a weak stomach or a familial relationship to Kate or I.) Taking cold showers before bed, sleeping au natural on top of the covers with two fans, and totally uncomfortable. But, David has everything. We bought a wireless internet device (don´t worry Mom and Dad, in a few years you´ll probably be able to rent one of those from the phone company, too) stocked up on supplies, watched a movie, and ate at Domino´s. Simultaneously delicious and completely disgusting. I´ve never felt more American. And then, for no real reason at all, we followed Kate´s compass here to Boquete, and haven´t stopped smiling since.

We got to town, and, first of all, the climate is perfect - and such a relief from David, that just standing still had the same effect on my body´s nerve endings as I would imagine heroin does. (A breezy, sunny 75 degrees in the mountains with a view of the cloud forest and a volcano.) Boquete is like Switzerland on a perfect summer´s day probably 75% of the time, and, as the name implies, there are flowers everywhere. So, after the initial seratonin dump, we just walked around in a happy stupor, and I just kept talking about how much I loved everything. People, dogs, banks, potholes, litter. Whatever, it´s all perfect.

We found a little place to eat called Amigos, and talked to the bartender, Alan, whom we now see on an almost daily basis (no, not because we´re drinking), and who is a musician and sculptor in addition to his night job serving drinks. We asked about a place to stay, and he sent us over to Nomba, where we met Lucho, who plays guitar and dedicates songs to us every Thursday night at Amigos. (Jeff Buckley´s "Hallelujah" remake mostly - incidentally, we met Jeff Buckley´s uncle the other night at Amigo´s, and he´s going to take us on a tour of the hot springs nearby). Lucho invited us to hear him sing at Amigos that night, and, there, we ran into a group of ex-pats and Panameños that do an apparently seamless culture and language swap from one moment to the next that was fun to watch, but a little hard to follow at first. And we went to sleep thinking, wow, what a cute place to hang out in for a little while.

The next evening, grocery shopping, we ran into Lucho again, who´d had a prophetic dream about me the night before. In the dream, I helped him fix his computer (which was kind of weird because I´ve done some of that since I´ve been down here - I set up the wireless internet for a hotel in Puerto Viejo in return for free internet and a place to watch the Oscars). Anyway, he invited us to go on a weekend trip with him and about 10 friends to a new hostel about an hour away in the cloud forest that he couldn´t remember the name of. We happened to have found the blogsite for the hostel, called "Lost and Found", and wanted to go there to check out possible work trade options. So, we went, had a blast, met the owners of the yet unopened hostel, two solid Kanucks, Patrick and Andrew, and promised to come back and build a house there someday. (Just kidding, mom.) But seriously, if anyone has some extra cash that they want to invest in real estate, Panama is a great place to do it. There´s a growing population of American, Canadian, and Swiss ex-pat retirees here (Hemingway-esque and otherwise), and beautiful retirement communities with golf courses and pools, for better or worse (mostly worse), are springing up everywhere.

Since then, we´ve come back to Boquete, rented an apartment, and been doing a work trade for 20 hours of free Spanish lessons a week with a great school run by a lovely Dutch/Tico couple and their three little girls. I´m sure Kate will post some of the pictures soon. Rocio is my favorite. She´s a year and a half, and communicates with tongue clicks, slurping noises, and two words, that I will never forget. Niña and agua. In her world, something is either a little girl or water. That simple. She also does this thing where she communicates by blinking, and I really think that if my mind were a little bit more open, a little less tied to the physical universe, I could probably communicate with her. Anyway, I´m pretty sure she´s reading my mind, but I´m not too worried about it.

So, that´s about it. The funniest language mistake I´ve made recently, though, was when I was painting a bedroom at the school yesterday. I broke a bunkbed ladder when I lifted it up from the bottom to paint behind it, and I had to go tell Fernando (the Tico owner) who made the ladder and all the bunkbeds and all of the woodwork in the place. So, I practiced what I was going to say, gathered my courage, and said, "Fernando, yo roto su escalera, donde yo llevanto me, para pintar el abajo." Which means, I learned, after a later translation by his wife, Ins, my Spanish teacher, something like, "Fernando I break your ladder when I lift myself up for to paint his bottom." But, he either understood, or was gracious enough not to ask who´s bottom I was painting.