Cecily comes to Panamá!

     On Saturday, September 1st, 2012, an amazing thing happened. Cecily, one of my amazingly fabulous friends from college walked through the immigration gate at Tocumen International Airport- first from her flight.
     It was a long day for both of us, as she started her travels from Omaha at 5:something in the morning, and   I started at 7:00 AM waiting for a bus to start my journey to the airport as well.  However, it all went smoothly- I arrived 2 hours before I'd expected, and Cecily's flight was just a few minutes late.  We caught a bus (the first of 3 to get us back to my site), and thus commenced a week of fun!
     After hours and hours of travel, we reached my house, and Cecily reminded me that it's unusual in the US for a house to have a concrete floor and the ceiling to simply be the underside of the corrugated metal roof.  But we had water almost all the time we were home, and the electricity cooperated as well!
     I know I wax verbose, so here's a quick breakdown of the week:
Saturday: Travel day
Sunday: El Valle
Monday: Santa Rita (hammock time and dinner with host family)
Tuesday: On travel to Chiriquí (where we saw bugs!)
Wednesday: David (cool to me, I believe Cecily might have been less than fascinated.)
Thursday: On travel to Herrera
Friday: Back to Santa Rita
Saturday: La Ciudad- Panama City
Sunday: Travel and mourning...and dragging myself back to normal life.
 
El Valle
     On Sunday, we went to El Valle, which is my province's main tourist attraction, with a market full of 'artesanias' - craft goods mostly from Panama's indigenous groups, with sections for produce, living plants, and craft fair style jewelry- lots of macrame/knotted jewelry stuff.  Oh, and to get there, we took off in the morning for the half-hour bus ride to the end of the road, and then a 2 hour walk up one side of the extinct volcano, and down a bit into the center of it, because that part is El Valle (aka, The Valley) and down into the center.  The part that was where the air (usually rainclouds) is apparently blew off in the mists of time...the rocky, smokey, dusty, acidic, volcanic mists.
     We had lunch at a little restaurant there, and Cecily got her first taste of Panamanian cuisine- pollo guisado, or stewed chicken, with rice, potato salad, and a little piece of platano en tentación, or 'temptation plantain'.  So far, so good!  We visited the market, and set off to find the "Square Trees," which the friendly fellow at the information kiosk told us was about half an hour walk away.  We set off, and naturally, it starts pouring down rain.  However, we pressed on, and after a brief respite at a conveniently located hotel, made it to the hotel where the 'square trees' were supposed to be- we followed the signs...but the gate was locked.  Disheartened, but not put off, we set across the lawn to inquire at the hotel, when we met a group coming the other direction, so we joined them.  (At this point, the rain was down to a light sprinkle.)  We went through the gate and started along the path when we looked back to see that the guide/employee had locked the gate behind us and returned to the hotel.  We followed the other group down the trail, over a comically wobbly bridge to a bit of a clearing where there were several 'square trees'.  (Walking down this path, Cecily was struck by how realistic the jungle area of the Omaha Zoo really was, in terms of trees and large vines looped at prime height for sitting on.)  The square-est trees were the adolescent trees- old enough to have the shape, but once they got older yet they became particularly root-y trees.  Still cool, though!

Square Tree: they actually grow with natural corners! 

After having our fill of the trees, we set about finding our way out.  There were signs all over that said 'sendero', which actually means 'path', but I didn't know that at the time, so we ignored one line of logic, and retraced our steps, where we confirmed that the gate was in fact locked, so we followed that Panamanian family from before out over the gate.  Woohoo!  We escaped the square trees, and started back to the center of town where it started to rain in earnest, that is to say, we were completely soaked to the point of forming cartoonish puddles around our feet whenever we stopped.  We agreed though, that once it was acknowledged that there was no avoiding the rain, it was pretty fun to get completely soppingly drenched.  After some difficultly getting a bus down to the highway, we eventually got back home, to...something for dinner, hot chocolate, and pixbae (pronounced pifa) with my preferred honey-and-massaman curry dipping sauce.  Cooking is fun here in the campo!

I also bought a hammock chair for my livingroom, which Cecily helped me hang :-)

Santa Rita
   On Monday, we visited my schools where I showed off our vegetable gardens and animals, and then took a brief tour of Anton, with a stop to get a pineapple at the market.  In the afternoon, we went to my host family's house for some quality hammock time in the afternoon rain, and then my host mom invited us for dinner, and Cecily got another taste of the delicious (Panamanian) comida (food) panameña.  :-D  In non-Panamanian food, we put together a muffin mix from my aunt and successfully baked them via advanced stovetopoven technology- they were delicious, and just slightly burned on the bottom.

--> Remedios, Chiriquí
   Tuesday saw us with more hours on the bus as we traveled to visit another volunteer named Ken, in the south-western-border province of Chiriquí.  We had a bit of a wander adventure in Santiago where we changed busses and wandered halfway across the town to find the airport- first adventure of my dragging Cecily around as I learned useful things about getting around.  We got to Ken's in the evening, where he took us on a tour of his site (way bigger and nicer than mine- he has multiple paved streets AND the streets had names!)  We met his very sweet dog, and took a walk in the evening in attempt to see stars and fireflies, and found fireflies and a weird glowing centipede thing.  Oh, and listened to the laser-tag frogs.

David
     I wanted to visit David, since I'd heard about it a fair bit from other volunteers, so we spent a couple more hours on the bus, a few hours wandering in the city (we brought strawberries, which grow in another city called Boquete, which is now on my to-visit list), before heading back to Ken's.  By the way, while at Ken's, we didn't eat Panamanian, but we did put together pretty delicious meals, a few of which involved copious amounts of peanut butter (on chicken stir fry, in oatmeal, on pancakes...good stuff.)  We also made a Shepherd's pie inspired meal which turned out well- yay for cooking by 'making it up as we go along'.

EDIT/ADDITION:  On Wednesday morning, we were having oatmeal mixed with all sorts of delicious things for breakfast.  At one point, just as I was starting to realize that something wasn't quite right, Cecily comments on "not wanting to alarm anyone" but she felt off, like her inner ear was awry.  We soon realized, once we got over the initial confusion of why we seemed to be moving while sitting at the table and why the wall appeared to be shifting a bit, that there was an earthquake- later found to be a 7.6 in Costa Rica.  One more life experience to cross off the list for Cecily and me!

Herrera
     On Thursday we took leave of Ken and wandered off to visit another volunteer, Miranda, in her more south-central province of Herrera, in the region known as the Azuero.  She showed us around her town with its lovely Spanish Colonial architecture, and told us about their festival atmosphere for Carnival, their saint days, etc.  We chatted, watched some Doctor Who, and admired her house and community (one of the biggest, I believe.)

Her town is famous for, well, everything festival related, including devil masks and  floats like this dude.

Santa Rita
     Friday morning brought us to Penonome, my stomping ground, where I showed Cecily around the 2 main streets, the park, mercado (market), where Cecily bought her cutarras- Panamanian sandals.  We had lunch with Nate and Julie, the two other volunteers from my group in my corner of Panama, before heading back to Santa Rita, where we "dimos la vuelta", or walked around the loop of my road.  We finished at my host family's house for another dinner, before coming back to my house for a final night there.  This evening held on of the excitement of dubious value, where we discovered that I have giant (up to a centimeter) ants living in my spare-room door.  We spent...I don't know how much time, but quite a bit carrying on an ant-massacre (movement), which culminated in my getting locked in the room, because the knob and lock were loose and bent and generally non-operational.  We rescued me by removing the knob completely.  Girl power!  One of these days I'll replace the door-knob, since I don't know how much of the damage we caused, and how much predated me, but in the meantime, I'm trying to eliminate the giant-disgusting-ant presence in my house.  Now I don't have Cecily to help, but I did get a can of bug death to help.  They're disgusting, and now I will only live in places with solid wood doors, because it's the only non-solid door in my house.  Actually, my bathroom door isn't either- will have to douse it in bugdeath too before the ants try to move in.  ICK!

At my host family's house, Ana (host mom) and Maryori (host sister) dressed Cecily up in some of Maryori's folclorica pieces (from the traditional Panamanian cultural dances)

Panama City
    Saturday saw us return to the City, where we stayed at Hostel Urraca, which is a little bit of beach house downtown- a very fun, chill place where volunteers tend to stay in the city.  We set out to eat at a German restaurant I'd heard about, and got rather lost, but eventually found it...open only for drinks.  But our sorrow was mitigated by the presence of a delicious Indian restaurant exactly across the street.  After our 3:30 lunch,  we (intentionally, this time) took the long way back through 'Calle Uruguay', home of a lot of clubs/bars/restaurants, and along a European-ish park and walking path along the Pacific.

La Despedida
      After a very cold night (where they have A/C in Panama, it's binary), we got up and caught a bus for the airport, where we arrived in good time, though a little close, for Cecily to check in and get through security.  I went back to the mall where I bought a Spanish translation of Pride and Prejudice, and made my way back to Santa Rita, to re-enter my life as a Peace Corps Volunteer in rural Panama, where this week, I have preparation for next week and Peace Corps meetings, and next week, we have the final trimester, and I'm starting my community English classes.  Woohoo!

I'll get more pictures up in facebook and google albums, but it took long enough for these few pictures, so I'll work on those another night.  I'm sure there are things I've forgotten, but here's a lot of it.  Ciao!