First Blog - Woot Woot!!
Embracing the Panamanian Culture - Brittany

  Outside our villa in the COK on the first day here!

Awesome tree around the corner from our villa. 

I know this is long overdue considering everyone else is on blog numbers 2 & 3, so don't mind my outdated post under Lauren's name :-) I typed it the 2nd night in Panama City. Here we go lol.... Yay, we made it!! So, today was our second day in Panama, City thus far. We woke up bright and early this morning around 8 o’ clock. Come to find out it was really 7 due to us forgetting to adjust our times on the clocks (whoops). I think back at it now and I could have used that extra hour of sleep. But instead of staying confined to our little room, we took a nice adventurous walk around the compound with that extra time to just see exactly where we were staying before we headed out to Chiriqui. So we are staying in the City of Knowledge, which is an old army base that was once controlled by the USA back when we had control of the Panama Canal. We are in a cute little 3 bedroom, 2 bath, along with a kitchen villa! We are staying at the City of Knowledge (found this link of information if you want to read more about it: http://health.usf.edu/intprog/panama/City_of_Knowledge.html)

It is pretty beautiful here in this little town, and in Panama in general. So many trees, lush landscaping, an abundant array of flowers.... Wish Florida looked like this!

The first day we arrived in the panama airport around 3 and it was pouring rain, monsoon style. My first culture shock was how crowded it was (people are all in your personal bubble) and the lack of cleanliness the airport had to offer. Besides that the thing that stuck out the most was how welcomed I felt by the few Panamanians we spoke to in the airport.

Here is a picture of our friend at the airport

Some of the views we were forced to enjoy :)

 My first cultural experience was when I spoke with one woman who lives in Panama, dear Lord I forgot her name already. But I spoke with her for nearly an hour at the airport. She filled me in on the wonderful food to try, which is the local fish, she explained to me that people from Panama are very welcoming, and by what I could see, she was a great example of that. She also mentioned things about the healthcare system: that Panama City apparently has the 5 best hospitals in Panama, and all the other hospitals she has experienced outside of the city are very run down: no soap, water, lack of toilet paper. Her friend had to be transported out of a hospital to a different hospital in Panama during a surgical operation due to lack of equipment! It was really cool talking with her. Another thing that was so different from the United States was the amount of lush beautiful rainforest areas. A lot of the areas we drove through were really underdeveloped, which was a nice change from the overdeveloped-building on top of building- Tampa Bay area. 

Lunch at Nico's. That fish & plantain was really good.
 Ended the meal with a frappacino...I should have stopped at the fish 

We have spent some time at local markets & restaurants, which have been delicious. So far I’ve tried empanadas, local fish (lightly breaded with lime juice- YUM), rice, beans, fajitas, spicy chicken wings and everything is so flavorful compared to back home. At the market today it was really neat to see some of the locally made items handcrafted by the natives. I purchased a few things to bring 

We searched the markets high & low for
cool gifts to bring home. 

back home to my friends and family. I must say it is hard to hassle down prices here when you know little Spanish. I think the only word I knew to say was cuánto? And clearly that didn't get me very far. I hope to expand my Spanish language by being here. We also visited the Panama Canal today. I was not looking forward to this at first. Not going to lie. But, it was surprisingly pretty cool to watch how it all worked, seeing the ships pass through the Caribbean Sea to the Pacific Ocean... I have a 20 minute video of one ship passing through, lol I can post it if anyone is dying to see it again ;-) I never really knew anything about the Panama Canal prior to this experience so I’m pretty glad I am now informed and got to experience that. Tomorrow we head out to Chiriqui which I am most excited for. I enjoyed the touristy things, but I’m ready to get to the “heart” of the trip. For now I will head to bed, everyone is already asleep in my villa. Tomorrow is an early day….Goodnight!

Panama Canal.... surprisingly enjoyed this!

 The architecture downtown was so beautiful .... looks like so much history wrapped in one picture

They were reconstructing buildings down town too. Here you can see on the left a
 building in it's original form, whereas the building on the
 right it has been reconstructed. I think I prefer the one on the left ;)

Some of the views we were forced to enjoy  ;)

The wonderful group that I will be spending the rest of the 3 weeks of my life with!

- Brittany Brewer