TheExpatJournals.com

I never did get to write up more about the miraculous Galapagos.  Life got in the way.  These days, I am actually writing for a living and I continue to both pinch myself and thank God on a daily basis that I got so lucky.

But I digress.  I had to go back up to Panama for several reasons, none of which were any fun since all involved either bureaucracy or lawyers and in Latin America, well that’s like the same in the US to the nth degree, always taking much longer and requiring a myriad of documents you don’t have ready.  For some reason, just finding out exactly what you do need is a huge part of the process.  I arrived at an Embassy thinking my carpeta complete only to be informed the website does not relay ALL that is actually needed.

And all you can do is listen carefully, take notes (or better yet, have the source write it down) and then go complete the new tasks.  That’s it..that is the trick to getting things done rather than succombing to either frustration or panic in terms of any Latin American bureaucracy.  After awhile, you can even begin to guess in advance how many trips a certain task might take.  Oh, this will be a 4 tripper to get what I need.

So armed with the patience anyone is bound to learn after 4.5 years in Latin America, I set out to finish up an abundance of paperwork necessary (again) for a number of things.  One good thing is that I actually adore my lawyer in Panama because he is as smart as any lawyer I ever met anywhere.  In some ways, I feel we have this innate understanding, appreciation and respect for each other.  So instead of being the typical horror story where dealing with lawyers in Panama is concerned, I ended up kissing his cheek as we parted!

I must say, Panama City has changed drastically.  If I were to look back at some of the complaints I used to superficially dive into on this very blog, well I’m afraid it has all come to pass.  In a sentence, if I were to visit Panama City today for the first time, there would be absolutely nothing that would appeal to me.  As I used to say, specifically about Casco Viejo, and now find it applies mostly across the board, I’m glad I got to live there when I did.

It sure seemed that anyone and everyone’s small talk was limited to crime.  Once upon a time, you couldn’t help but overhear conversations about real estate because it seemed like no one was capable of discussing anything nor had anything else on their mind.  That’s been replaced by robberies, armed robberies, shootings and murders.  I could not believe how many people seemed so afraid of everyday life now that crime is so prevelant.  Shopkeepers, waitresses, taxi drivers…it was on the lips of everyone.

I promised to bring a friend a mola.  I went into a gift shop in El Cangrejo.  As I’m looking around, a man walked in which immediately scared the shop clerk.  She looked at me as if to say, “I’m not sure of what I think about him nor am I sure I want to even ask him if he needs help.”  But she did, learned he was a tourist and seemed to relax.  After he left and we were alone, she explained that the Chino down the street was recently robbed and a father and son were killed.  Also, one of the hotels on the block had recently been robbed.  So now, she lived in fear of being next.

I bought a camera lens in a great little shop.  The owner almost immediately starts telling me about the news on TV last night of two women, two tourists, who had rented a car just like the one I drove up in and were followed out by other women who shot at them 7 times in order to rob them.  Apparently, neither were killed, but one lost an eye and both were hospitalized.

I went to visit friends who bought a place across the Canal in Majagual.  To get there, you must drive through Veracruz.  All I heard from them was about the weekly murders, their neighbor who had been shot, etc.  When I left, they made me promise to phone them once I got back to the bridge so they would know I had made it through Veracruz without incident.

But I think perhaps the most telling was my friend Blanca.  Blanca (often referred to or written about during my Panama years) opened La Casona over 3 years ago just off of Plaza Herrera back when Greyskull still existed, a large 5 story gang hotel.   3 years ago, even the locals in Casco Viejo would warn you about walking in that area.  I never had a problem nor did Blanca.  She used to get the gang members to check their guns at the door before they were allowed to enter.  They complied.  As she once said to me about all that, “They feel our intent.”

So this time, after hanging out in the new and improved La Casona location on the other side of Plaza Herrera, Blanca walked me out to get a taxi.  When I told her I wanted to walk up through the old neighborhood, she urged me to ‘be careful.’  The woman who had gang members check their guns at the door NOW felt afraid???

Luckily, I never experienced a problem, on the contrary had a couple of wonderful experiences.  Leaving Tocumen, to save a few bucks I decided to take the van.  Waited and waited, but no one came to share it with me, so the driver offers to head out with just me for an extra $5.  I take him up on the offer and off to Albrook we head.  I get out at the airport and am on the way inside the city airport with my belongings when I hear, “Senora! Senora!”  I had left my good Canon DSLR in the van and he was hurrying it over to me.  Wow.

I go inside Albrook Airport with six hours before my flight, but knowing I want to find a way to leave my things there and go shopping in Albrook Mall.  Granted, there’s nowhere to store your things and they won’t let you check your luggage in way before your flight, but once again, I got lucky.  An Air Panama desk clerk takes sympathy and escorts me into the locked, attended VIP lounge where I can store my things.  Later, I did give him a tip when I returned, but he didn’t even indicate that would be expected up front.  Wow #2.

So I go shopping, get very lucky with purchases and finally head back for my flight.  I am escorted into the VIP Lounge where I was able to repack my suitcase to accommodate my new purchases.  Then I head over to the counter to check in for my flight.  Same agent attends to me, but this time, I do have to pay an overweight charge.  You used to always be able to get away with that…well, most of the time…but apparently, not anymore.  I give him money and he needs to give me change, which, in my foggy state of mind I promptly forget about.  Bear in mind, I woke up at 4am, traveled to Panama and into town, did hours of shopping and well, now am not in the clearest frame of mind. So I get checked in and head across the waiting room to take a seat and keep reading a fascinating book by Margaret Wittmer called, “Floreana”. About 10 minutes later, the agent appears in front of me with $10 change from the $20 I had given him.  Wow # 3.

I head up to Boquete and it’s still one of the most beautiful places I have seen anywhere, though still nothing more than a gringo retirement community.  Which is fantastic if that’s what you’re looking for, but as one person who has moved from Boquete to Cuenca put it, “I got tired of watching the grass grow.”  Good to see old friends and good to get what I needed to take care of up there done.  And yes, it is warmer in Boquete than it is in Cuenca and that’s pretty nice, but I still loathe the heat and humidity of Panama City and will take the cool…what some call cold…climate of Cuenca anyday.

But back to the city I go…which means finding a hotel which equals a nightmare.  But find one I did.  Convenient, good AC, clean, comfy bed and US CNN which gave me my fill of election coverage…well, not really, but since I don’t get election coverage in Ecuador (apart from C-span), so be it.  I voted in the primaries.  I volunteered for Obama and made about 100 phone calls a week.  A man in Cuenca gave me the shirt off his back once…almost literally.  He was walking with his son and grandson when I touched his arm and asked, “Don’t have any more of those shirts with you, do you?”  He let me know that this shirt HAD to attend his son’s wedding that same day up in the Cajas, but afterwards, it was mine.  True to his word, I got a call and he left it at his hotel for me to pick up after his departure.  Someone else brought me one from the US.  A big thank you to you both…you know who you are!

Okay, so back to Panama and my El Cangrejo  (casino and hooker central…Panama City’s version of Times Square before Disney invested) hotel where I ended up spending a lot of time due to needing to work and hey, at least the internet was good.  Now begins my real ordeal with bureaucracy and lawyers, but fortunately, it was offset by some really nice meals with some really nice friends. Well, that plus a lot of ‘retail therapy’ to offset revisting the scene of the trauma Panama certainly became for me.

One of the best things about heading to Panama was the chance to get my good camera back.  I have so missed photography for the love of photography and there is no Canon authorized dealer in Ecuador.  I knew where to take it in Panama City.  Took the guy about 30 seconds to diagnose, “It’s not your camera.  It’s the lens.”  I tried to get him to clean it as long as I was there, but he insisted it did not need cleaning.  So now, I do have a new lens and will get to get back to something I love doing.  Sorry, but after a digital DSLR, point and shoots just don’t cut it.

So the whole year + I have lived in Ecuador, I am still visciously attacked in an online site by one man who by, his own admission, is doing everything he can possibly do to smear me.  Others, even those who don’t hate him, have termed it what it is, a smear campaign.  I could go into the long history of why, but it’s really quite boring and petty.  So I have tried to move on with my life in spite of having what one dear friend and former business partner of many years now calls my ‘cyber stalker.’   And since my former (brief) business partner in Panama both wrote me and voiced to me that he would “destroy” me if I didn’t just roll over and get screwed, most in the expat community just assumed my cyber stalker had been cut in on the deal in order to walk the fine line of what is considered criminally illegal in Panama…calumnia y injuria.  I was attacked for months before I moved away from Panama, but usually defended by the expat community.  Actually, it could be considered years if we went all the way back to eloquent ramblings by my cyber stalker on Yahoo groups…posts like “Leslie is a dumb fucking cunt ”.

If you’re at all interested in the history, here it is in a nutshell …cyber stalker’s patterns ,  other innocent victims ,  any competition becomes a victim as do unconscious or dead people .  So suffice it to say, I have lots of company and he has alienated many people and most, criminally so.

Se la vie.  People do what people do and it’s not in my power to change that, but it did seem to all heighten what had been growing more and more obvious…Panama changed too much too fast and no longer resembled the country I first fell in love with.  Greed spread like a cancer to all walks of life, to all economic strata and once you could no longer have a real cultural exchange with even a campesino, well it added up to a serious lack of motivation to jump through the increasingly bureaucratic hoops necessary for a Visa.  I no longer wanted to be there.

I fought the good fight, did all I could do and then needed to find a way to let go of the months of stress and trauma and get on with life.  In some ways, it reminded me of being in downtown NYC to witness 9-11 up close and personal.  I still remember the first time I went up to mid-town and it sure seemed like people there were just going about their normal lives, but for me, I was still stuck in that week and in all that had happened that week and it was all still bouncing around inside me with no place to land, therefore, rendering me unable to move forward.  So in Panama, the first week I was finally ‘free’ to move forward, the government announced the tourist Visa had been changed to 30 days.  I had been essentially living there on a tourist Visa and getting it renewed every 90 days without problems.  It had become pretty clear that was going to grow increasingly less acceptable.  Which meant get a permanent Visa or leave. None of my stressful situations had motivated me to leave Panama, but for some reason, that was the moment I decided I was done.  In the US, it hadn’t been 9-11 or TL’s death 4 months later or Bush’s ‘election’ nor the mid-term elections.  It was the day we bombed Iraq that something inside shifted.  In Panama, it was the day they changed the tourist Visa to 30 days after six months of hell.

I had been to Cuenca and had been paying attention to Cuenca for over 2 years at that point.  (Maybe even longer as I met a guy in Cuenca who used to have this really informational website and when I asked him how long it had been down, I was astonished to hear ‘over 3 years.’ ) So I left Panama for a visit from the perspective of possibly living here.  I had plans to visit Quito, the coast, etc but once in Cuenca, I just didn’t want to leave.  So I didn’t.  Stayed here for 3.5 weeks and loved it.  It took a few months once I got back to Panama, but I knew my research was over and I knew where I wanted to live.  As I had managed to go back in time when leaving NYC for Panama, now I got to go back in time when leaving Panama for Ecuador.

This whole time I’m still being attacked by my cyber stalker,  smears are printed that say I am wanted by the police in Panama.  Now Panama is pretty computerized in terms of Immigration, so I must say that to come in and out of the country 4 times, once sitting in Immigration to pay an overstay fine before leaving the country, well, either their computers must really, really suck or I’m not wanted for anything in Panama.  And who in their right mind would actually fly into a country if they were actually wanted by the police?  That anyone still puts any credence into such nonsense defies logic.  Lies, damned lies and more lies.  (nod to you, estimado abogado)

The one place I find I miss in Panama is Portobelo .  And fortunately, it has not changed very much.  It is still the black, poor, stunning spot on the Bay it has been for centuries.  Full of mystery and magic; wholly owned by the heart and soul of its locals…God that place is beautiful.  It used to be my special spot.  I rediscovered my love of photography at the first Diablos y Congos Festival I attended. It was then I realized you could get  lost behind a lens in the same way that, for a musician, the world ceases to exist when playing. I spent all my New Year’s Eves there in the compound a dear friend has had on the water for decades.  I once spent my birthday there, too.  Whenever I wanted a peaceful, stunning place to get away, I headed for Portobelo.  It was shocking and so sad to hear about the fluke death just before I arrived of a wonderful photographer and special human being, Gustavo Araujo.  His final resting place is a place around the Bay in Portobelo, another magical spot also owned by my friend… Puerto Frances.  God speed Gustavo.

I was yet again reminded on this trip by some of Portobelo’s own what officials in Portobelo once said to me, “Where are you from originally?”  When I responded, they said, “Well now, you’re a Portobelena.”  They took me into their spiritual embrace as one of their own.  Still do.  I love some of the people and my soul is fed every time I visit.  I never wrote about Portobelo in case word spread and people starting heading there and ruining it like most other places in Panama.  But I don’t think it can be ruined.  It is too strong culturally, historically and besides, most of the land is ROP and therefore you end up in nightmares not unlike what gave Bocas such a deservedly bad rep back in the day.

But New Year’s Eve wasn’t the same this past year without being there.  And this time, I happened there just before the world renowned Black Christ Festival. My friend Sandra suggested I go to the church and light a candle.  I did.  That’s a first, but it was nice to be there without a camera just being a part of instead of observing.  It is and always will be special to me.  And that, no trauma will take away.  That is always a place of peace and strength when I visit.  I love it there.  Still, Portobelo or no, I could not wait to get back to Cuenca.

I wept on the way over to Portobelo, watching the purple velvet robed making that long, hot pilgrimage and noticing the many gashes now cut away into the hills along the Transistmica.  In some ways, I suppose it was as though I see Panama as an entity, a living being…an entity who had been abused, raped if you will and I felt like crying for her, for Panama.  I also wept on the plane coming back to Ecuador.   It was as though I had taken a haunted walk and afterwards, had a sense of resolve previously lacking.  I half wondered sometimes if I had chosen Cuenca in the sense of settling, as opposed to not settling.  When I knew I wanted to leave Panama, I explored all sorts of options for many months and came close to going back to the US.

Now, Cuenca is not only not settling, it is my privilege and my good fortune to live here in this incredible city with its beauty and peace and culture.  What it lacks in drama (like Panama), it more than compensates for in lack of drama.  One of the characters Cuenca possesses that Panama lacks became quite clear as a result of my return trip. Dignity.  In Panama, there is juego vivo.  No one here can make out what that means until you explain it to them and then, they find it…shall we say distasteful?  In Panama, they like loud music, loud voices, loud mufflers, the skin and salsa culture, sequins, strappy sandals, neon, gaudy, flash and whatever new money can buy.  One day, sitting outside at a Lebanese restaurant, I saw 2 Hummers, 1 Maserati and some other car equally ostentatious that I no longer even remember all at one corner. Even the wealthy in Cuenca, Juan Eljuri apart, don’t flaunt it.  They invest in family, in art, in education, in tranquility, in richness of living, not in what one powerful rabiblanco’s description of Panama’s national pastime is of ’screwing Americans.’  Well, that was half of the national pastime, but since this is a PG blog, you’ll have to fill in the other half for yourself, but I’ve at least provided the right verb for you to use.

One other thing that I thought of while in Panama was how any Cuenca visitors from Panama always  exclaim, “I can’t believe how clean Cuenca is!”  I used to notice when they made those comments, but didn’t remember Panama as particularly dirty…more accurately, had forgotten.  In all fairness, Casco Viejo had street sweepers every morning, so maybe it’s just not as dirty as other parts of Panama, city or country, because this time, I had a visual reminder of why that tends to be one of the things visitors notice about Cuenca.  I recently received an email from someone who has been a travel writer, someone who lives in Boquete who recently spent a month in Cuenca.  One of the things he wrote was that Cuenca was the cleanest city he had every seen anywhere.  (Dignity)

Beside the heat and humidity, the crime, the filth and the constant hustle, Panama is so blatantly now about nothing more than the almighty dollar.  Yes, in this day and age, almighty and dollar do seem something of an oxymoron, but you get the idea.  If you look back at my original journals in this blog, I was lamenting the fact that that’s what the US had grown to be like.  So maybe, I’m doomed to forever chase another age that did revolve around more than money…where people and ideas and art and education and goodness actually did still have some social value.  So be it.  At least I’ve found that here in Cuenca for now.  I hope it stays that way, but you never know.

I think back to two things around all of this.  I was once walking down the street…the corner of 43rd and 9th to be exact…when a friend received a phone called from a friend in California moaning about how much she missed NYC.  He said to her, “Honey, the NYC you miss doesn’t exist anymore.”  I feel the same statement now applies to Panama.  The other thing is something I once wrote in a private email to describe the difference between Panama and Cuenca.

I said that Panama was like the stunning, sexy woman men go crazy for…the one that involves high drama and is never satisfied.  Eventually, you break up and your heart is broken.  But then along comes the one you actually take home to meet the folks…that’s Cuenca.  And it is.  I could not wait to get back while I was away.  This is sane.  This is healthy.  This is the one that can last because it provides you with the foundation you need to grow in all the right ways.  And that is Cuenca for me.  Whatever it took to get me here, all I know now is how lucky I am to be here.  Maybe everything does happen for a reason after all.