third world lifestyle

FOR THE MOST PART, I AM AN EASY GUY TO PLEASE. Give me some nice warm weather and a box of original Ritz crackers and I’m generally happy. When you bring monkeys into the picture, I’m in heaven. Panama pleasantly surprised me when I first arrived here a long time ago. Panama City is pretty modern, having lots of tall buildings and a fairly robust banking center, but it’s the men on horseback and the roadside meat shacks on the outskirts of town that seem hilariously outdated. In a sense, this contrast, this juxtaposition of old and new, of tradition and contemporaneity, is what keeps me on my toes.

Because the US military occupied Panama for so long, we have many more chain restaurants than most Central American countries. We have Quizno’s, Burger King, and my personal favorite, Wendy’s, where I can continue my ongoing study of fries to see if there really is a difference between medium and large servings. Most of these fast food outlets will deliver it to your house via noisy little motorbikes. One would think that this type of service would feed the lazy and sedentary demographic of the country, but Panamanians, for the most part, are not fat.

Mistake: Arriving in Panama in September without a raincoat. It’s hard to complain about the weather here, though: around 80 year-round. The rainy season lasts a good five months, during which you can expect a torrential downpour every few days. It is during this season that I have come to experience new levels of rain, new intensities of rain that I did not know existed before. Just yesterday, for example, it was raining so hard that this jet of rainwater lifted a child’s toy truck, one of those with orange bodywork and a yellow roof, and took it to Via Argentina.

During rain storms, I come up with lyrics. If you didn’t know, I’m an underground rap artist and sometimes like to use my articles as marketing vehicles for this talent. Here are some lines I put together about Panama:
“Yes, I like to go to the beaches
Las Palmas, you know.
Cheaters envy if I want to get dirty in Coronado
Coral Lodge in San Blas
And when I get there, I just sit back and relax.”
The security standard here is quite high, though it’s the occasional murder or robbery that just reminds me of that all too cliche topic of ‘living in the third world’. I’ve been robbed, and it’s not really that bad: in fact, I say if you can’t beat them, join them. For many people, living in a big city with petty crime is a bad thing, but for me there couldn’t be a better place to practice robbery on my own. I mainly do pickpocketing and get into dog naps. In the hierarchy of criminals, pickpockets like me are kind of at the bottom, one above mailbox snatchers and guys who steal cakes from window sills.

In all seriousness though, the cops are pretty friendly and good to expats like me. However, it is a city, and with city life comes crime. Nothing is too extreme, and to give you an idea, we feel more comfortable here than in Washington DC Costa Rica has received an embarrassing reputation for prostitution and some of that applies to Panama as well. Lots of men explore that realm, and while they’ll never tell their partner, a good portion of them are cheating on their spouses. This is like asking a mime who is his favorite artist: you know he has one, but he will never tell you his name.

There is an old saying that goes something like this: Give a man a fish, he will eat fish for a day. Give a man a fishing rod and he will catch tuna that very day. The fishing down here is truly spectacular, rivaling that of Mexico. We have what is considered “the best fishing lodge in the world” in the Darien jungle. We also have what I consider to be the best shortcut in the world, the Panama Canal, which is little more than a tourist trap.

I’m sure there is some way to calculate the standard of living and I’m assuming it’s on a 100 point scale. If that’s the case, I’d give Panama a 94. I love the fact that I can have a beautiful $100 dinner on top of a tall building (the restaurant scene is out of the woods) or a mountain of food from $2 in a coffee. I love how I can be in city meetings in gleaming buildings with fancy dressing rooms and then 2 hours later sitting in the Caribbean archipelago of San Blas with a 500 year old Kuna tribe. I love the infrastructure, which makes it easy to access secluded beaches and mountainous regions on a windy afternoon. In my opinion, Panamanians really like to pass themselves off as tough. However, I love the people because I think they are unique: tough on the outside but warm and sincere in the middle, similar to Junior Mints.

If you are reading this, then you have probably taken the time to read the entire article for which I congratulate you. However, I would recommend that you do something more productive with your time: go to night school or something. Oh, and if today is your birthday, happy birthday.