As I write this, I am 12 stories off the ground, poolside on a rooftop deck with sweeping views of Panama City, beer at my side, earbuds firmly planted, Radiohead given reign over the din of horns and sirens below. Its about 85 degrees outside, the skies are blue, the palm trees are swaying, and I'm about 3 days away from sugar-sand bliss in Bocas Del Toro, so if you're wondering how I'm doing since my last report, I'd say I'm doin alright.
I feel much more in place, happy to be here and NOT looking forward to my now-fixed return home of Monday, March 5th (kicking and screaming seems like the right way to go out).
Anyway, I'm in Panama City now, which is great, and I've been touring all over the place with my uncle (actually, my mom's cousin), Ovidio. I had been staying with him until today, when I decided that it would be criminal not to find a rooftop pool deck, given the heat, the humidity, and the fantastic views. So he's out running some errands (will join me later) and I'm here, baking in the sun, melting in the humidity and basically, for the moment, an apparition of perfection.
Ovidio, it turns out, is the the perfect guy to have waiting for you when you show up in a strange, giant, throbbing Central American city looking for distant family connections and a sense of place and context between the skyscrapers and the jungle. Not only is he completely hospitable, he's also a walking encyclopedia, something of a hobbyist historian on all things Panama, a full-service tour guide, and the keeper of the family genealogy. The records he has of the blood line are incredible. He has a written record of every person (literally every child, grandchild, great-grandchild, aunt, uncle, cousin - EVERYone) all the way back to my great-great-great grand father, Jose Manuel Gallardo, who was born in 1865 in Colombia, and eventually parented 14 children in Panama! It turns out I even have a big jolly Caribbean aunt! I met her the day I got here. I'll be going home with a few pictures of my grandmother (one is a wedding photo with the grandfather I never met, but whom everyone says I look like and the other is a picture of her when she was a little girl with her sisters and her mother, who appears to me a lot like the indigenous indian women I have seen here). All told, as of my generation, there are no less than 699 (known) decedents, which made it hard for me to walk down the street today without feeling like I was somehow related to everyone I passed on the sidewalk.
This week was Carnaval, which was exciting: lots of crazy costumes, water fights and crowd-drenchings, parades and fireworks. I've also been to the canal, of course, which truly is an incredible feat of human engineering and persistence (the French spent 20 years and many lives and eventually gave up - it took the Americans another 10 to finish it after that). We also took in some traditional folkloric dancing over dinner last night.
And I've seen 4 different Panama Cities here: there's the ruins of the original 16th-century settlement, destroyed by pirates, there's colonial Panama, built by the Spanish 100 years later, and then there's modern Panama, which is really two places unto itself: the remnants of Noriega's reign, a people rising from the ashes of dictatorship and striving to create a middle class amid an ever-present military police force, and the New Panama, a dense and sprawling forrest of waterfront luxury condo and hotel developments. I was told before I showed up that Panama City is the "Manhattan" of Central America, and it certainly appears that way from a distance. Even Donald Trump has a tower here. But the more I learn about the development going on, the more appropriate a comparison seems to Dubai or Abu Dabi. Literally there must be 40 brand new towers, and at least another 10 under construction. So, who's moving in? No one. According to my uncle, who is also former government economic advisor and current economics professor at the University of Panama, the soaring vacancy rates don't bother the primary investors : "business men" from Colombia who are just looking to park their excess millions. And as if the comparisons to the Middle East weren't obvious enough, Trump's tower is even shaped like the infamous original sailboat building (so unoriginal), and the shoreline is being expanded; they are building a peninsula-island to create more waterfront property, just like Jumira. The government is also undertaking a full restoration of all the historic quarters, and the installation of a subway system, seemingly across the entire city at once (traffic is horrible), all of which has been undertaken in the last ten years, since Noriega was put behind bars, coinciding nicely with the canals finally being turned over to the Panamanians in 1999. I guess maybe I notice it more because of my construction background, but Holy Cow there is a lot of work going on here. It's good to see cranes again!
I'm here in the city another few days before I head for the beaches. Lea stayed in Ecuador an extra week to soak that in while I'm here, but we'll head out of town when she gets here on Monday.
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