Photos and Culture Points

I hope you all appreciate that I am spending our first day off ever here in Panama blogging and uploading pictures at long last. You can view them here.

Today I´m looking to fill you in on the culture points that I haven´t had time to write about in my other exhaustive summaries.

TOP 10 THOUGHTS ON PANAMANIAN CULTURE

10. If you ever took a Spanish class, you learned that the word bastante means "enough." As in, I have enough food, or We have enough time to go shopping. In Panama, bastante is only used to mean a lot or too many. How many grandchildren to you have? BASTANTE. It is a word you usually have to yell. This takes some getting used to, but now I enjoy having a way to express myself in extreme a way as possible.

9. If you ever have to ask directions, make sure to ask at least three people, because they will all give you some vague answer that mostly consists of wild gesturing and pointing with their lips. There are no maps anywhere-- not for public transit, not in malls. Towns don´t have street names, and there are eight different Diablo Rojo buses that can take you to the same place. Speaking of Diablo Rojos, they make up the public bus system here, and they look like this. At first they´re quite intimidating, but they´re really not so bad, as long as you don´t think too closely about the fact that you are barreling down the street in an outdated American school bus with 100 other people packed shoulder-to-shoulder.

8. If they call you fat, it´s a good thing. Within minutes of arriving in Santa Clara, Nani was already on the phone with her friends, telling them a "gordita" gringa had arrived. By the afternoon, Greysi was rolling up my shirt and pointing to my stomach saying, "asi gordita." For Panamanians, this is a compliment; it doesn´t really mean you´re fat, more so that you´re the right weight. It is also acceptable and normal to ask people how old they are, no matter how old. Go for it. I will miss being able to do this later when I one day return to the U.S.

7. Another vocab twist. "Ahora", despite its dictionary definition, never means "now." If you ask when you should do something, and someone says "ahora," wait at least 20 minutes and ask again.

6. We have been told many times that Panamanian time in general is quite different from American time. When we´re in our sites, if we want to give a charla at 10, we tell people to get there at around 8:30, with the idea that by 10, most people should be trickling in. There is also no sense of urgency in restaurants, where you can sit for an hour before a waiter comes to greet you. If you´re going to eat out, give yourself a few hours. I´ve gotten good customer service in malls or large supermarkets, but everywhere else, not so much. Be assertive.

5. No one can believe that the gringas don´t have boyfriends or husbands, and because of this, they are constantly asking who you have crushes on, who you think is cute, and if there is a secret boyfriend somewhere you´re not telling them about. They also want you to find love in Panama and constantly tell stories of other Peace Corps volunteers falling in love here.

4. If someone unleashes a flurry of uncomprehensible (and sometimes toothless) Spanish at you, and you ask them to say it again, they will almost always repeat/emphatically gesture the only word you understood. Sometimes I am just too tired to ask them again.

4. Panamanian women can do everything better than you. The first weekend here, we went hiking, and I didn´t have boots yet. I hiked through a lot of mud with only sneakers on, and when I came home, Nani was horrified to see my dirt-laden shoes. One day, she set out a bucket of soapy water and instructed me to get to scrubbin´. I was in a rush to get to class, but I thought I did a decent job, but there was mud caked everywhere, and some parts of the shoe would simply never be clean again.

I was wrong.

When I came back, she laughed and told me I didn´t know how to clean anything. My shoes stood before me, sparkling white, right down to the shoelaces.

Similarly, during culture week, I got some sea urchin spines stuck in my foot. When I got home, my host mother noticed I was fussing over them, and once I told her what they were, she immediately ran into the house, came back with a needle, and began furiously digging them out.

There are problems that sometimes you think you can´t solve. Your Panmanian host mother will find a way.

2. The food. Panama is second only to China in terms of how much rice is consumed per capita. When I first arrived, there was a heaping mound of rice on my plate at almost every meal. Portion sizes have been adjusted accordingly now that we´ve realized I can´t actually consume a pound of rice in one sitting. Here are the good and bad about the food I´ve discovered here:

The Bad:
Everything is fried. I am typically served at least two hot dogs a day, and in the morning, it is cut lengthwise and dropped in oil in order to maximize its contact with the deep-fried goodness. These are getting harder and harder to eat. But I might miss them one day, depending on what sort of food I´ll be eating in site.

Ojaldre- This is essentially fried dough that is frequently served with my hot dog at breakfast. I wouldn´t be so opposed it if wasn´t frequently the first thing I eat in the morning.

Fried platanos- these are flavorlesss, starchy, and ubiquitous in Ngobe villages. I ate them every day during culture week. With ketchup, they´re not so bad. It is more the frequency with which I eat fried food that bothers me, rather than the individual foods. Panama´s flavors in general are pretty bland.

The good:

Duros- these are basically homemade popsicles frozen in sandwich bags, but they come in amazing flavors like pineapple, or nansey. Nansey is a small, bitter fruit that grows from trees everywhere here. It is sort of citrusy, but when combined with sugar in a duro, it is the perfect treat. My abuela sells duros for 10 cents a piece, and I am a regular customer.

Pifa- a golfball-sized fruit that also grows everywhere here. A lot of the trainees hate pifa, but I love it. Its starchy and has the consistency of squash. Delicious when dipped in a little salt, and I hear it´s packed with vitamins.

CocaCola- I now have a new appreciation for soda. It is still sold in glass bottles here, and Coca Cola would really be proud of how we flock to any small tienda with a fridge for our daily fix. Further, it´s made with real sugar unlike in the States, and that really makes all the difference.

1. Machetes can be used for everything. During tech week, we used red-hot machetes to cut into 55-gallon barrels for water-catchmen systems. They can also chop down trees, cut up fruit, mow lawns, you name it. I cannot wait to bring the machete back into vogue in the U.S.