We bid our friends in David goodbye and headed towards Santiago, about four hours away. Kathy had given us the name and number of her son, Ahren, who had invited us to stay with them for a few days. Ahren was an avid motorcyclist in the states, and he recently moved to Panama, having also met a Panamanian doctor.

Ahren and Magally:


We ended up spending almost two weeks here, partially because our hosts and their family was incredible, partially because we were helping Ahren deal with shipping a container in from the USA.

Santiago, with Magally's family, was incredible. Probably the best we've gotten to know a family on this trip. They welcomed us with open arms and we spent many days immersed in the Panamanian way of life. I don't know where to start with our time in Santiago, so I'll just tell some highlights.

Family trip to the river, first day:

Feasted on chicken, rice and guandu. Guandu is a bean grown in Panama, that only grows for two months a year. During these two months, everything is served with guandu.

Crazy fruit I don't remember the name of:



Going out to a little port town for dinner with the family.


Dirt cheap fish plates, before and after.


It was Oriel´s (Magally's nephew) 16th birthday and we bought him a cake.


Vicky is a professor at the local highschool, which is apparently the biggest in Central America. She gave us a tour of the school and Santiago.
The school was incredible:


The artist died while painting this auditorium and it was left unfinished.

Beatiful, detail everywhere.

Museum of Santiago displaying traditional Panamaian wear:

Bascillica outside of Santiago:


Vicky also killed some of her chickens to make us Panamanian sancocho (delicious soup of onion, garlic, cuillantro(?) and chicken). Also, Panamian tamales (a little different, they have olives in them).

Went to the Veraguas fair:

The young ones love the horse rides:


We also spent several days driving to and from Panama City with Ahren, Magally and Beto. Panama city has insane traffic, and Magally will not drive there and Ahren does not have a license yet. Beto is Magally´s uncle, who volunteered three full days of his time to driving us around Panama city, skipping work to do it. Because "you're family". I saw time and time again friends and family going to extreme lengths to help one another out. Quite incredible.

The reason for our trips to Panama city were to retrieve a container of tools and furniture that Ahren had shipped to Panama from the states. It was supposed to be a simple, drive up, sign, pick up deal. Done by lunch. It ended up being three days (20+ hours, no exaggeration) of driving through gridlock traffic from office to office, so Ahren could fork over hundreds of dollars to shady middlemen or useless buearucrats. We would get marriage papers, employment papers, residence papers in order, and then we would spend hours to find out that X document wasn't valid, Y document needed to be translated, Z document needed to be notarized again. It was a heroic effort. We drove to and from Panama (8 hours round trip) city twice, had to spend the night there once, and spent days driving around in Panama city gridlock. 10 days late and $1500 later, the container was home.


A miserable experience for Ahren, but me and Michelle didn't mind it. We got to see Panama city without the stress or expense of navigating it ourselves. What a city! Huge skyscrapers everywhere. The most extravagant and modern city we've seen all trip.
Popping up over the hills on the road in.

Unforunately no good pictures, so I stole this one off google to give some idea of the scale of this city.


Muchas gracias a todo la familia en Santiago. Me encanta la experiencia que yo tuve en su ciudad. Nunca voy a olividarlo. Espero que puedo regresar muy pronto.

2/22/11

After such a long time in the Panama interior, we were looking towards the South, excited about South America but with still no idea how we could do it with our budget. We said goodbye to our friends and headed for Colon to find out...