TheExpatJournals.com

Well, it feels akin to that in-between hair stage on this board right now. There are lots of things happening in the neighborhood, but I’m not well enough informed to actually write about any of it.
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Okay, after listening to me moan for months and after my last entry where I considered drugging the neighbor’s obnoxious, loud dog, I did it. I found a way to drug the thing and once I realized it didn’t kill the dog, I cannot say I felt a moment of remorse. Melatonin. Crushed with a hammer and stuck on the side of a piece of turkey. He would sleep and I would get a noise free afternoon.

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It’s been nearly 7 months since I took my apartment in Casco Viejo.To recap, for the better part of a year, I researched Panama and was absolutley smitten from afar. By the time I came down to spend a month exploring, I felt like I knew the place fairly well; it was just a matter of seeing and experiencing the information accumulated in my head, making it real as it were.
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It started at 7:15AM and just never stopped all day. A crew of five clearing stuff out of the apartment above me…bang, bang, banging and every move accompanied by yelling and yelling that echoed through the stairwells and courtyard bouncing into the apartment as though it were happening in here, not up there. I wanted to scream at the constant noise level. So I did. Just screamed and cursed in English for awhile. No louder than anybody else around here. I finally realized I could never work in this and went to a movie. The cab driver picked someone else up on the way and then basically yelled at him the whole way over. When I sat in the theater, they talked all around me in spite of the ‘looks.’
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The temperature lately has been mostly perfect. I’m sitting on my balcony because I succumbed to my addiction and started smoking again and refuse to stink up my house. For awhile there, before the bronchitis, I was smoking for about 4 days wearing a disposable plastic glove on my right hand to diminish the nasty odor…makes for a bizarre fashion statement. With cigarettes $1.35 per pack, it was just too much of a temptation. And I’ve developed a very nasty Coke habit because it’s everywhere and only 25 cents a bottle (if you bring an empty) at the Chino’s on the corner! One thing about Coke here is that it’s sweeter than in the US. I was looking at the ingredients last week and there’s no corn syrup, so it’s all sugar. Because none of these little markets have air conditioning, there’s not much of a candy counter, thank God. It was interesting to note how they sell medication, like Tylenol, etc, by single tablets. I watched a woman purchase individual tablets of about four different kinds of medication. And it doesn’t appear as though many of the locals smoke. I assume that’s because, to them, $1.35 is a lot of money. Having said that, the Chino also sells individual cigarettes, too.

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Yeah…the Panamanian attitude of Manana is hitting me. Actually, when I opened this, it was in lieu of having the skill set to build a website and horrible baggage from nightmares with developers in my all too current previous life in NYC. So it was mainly for sharing my photos and journals as opposed to me expecting it to get the kind of activity VEW and CEW and AIP get. Having said that, I do hope to put together a killer website that might offer a lot of comprehensive information without soliciting tour packages or hiding behind fake magazines to sell overpriced real estate, etc.

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