Casco Viejo is like the Beacon Hill of Panama City - old charming neighborhood, with grossly inflated housing prices.
Tuesday was a very productive day for us. After canceling all my cards when I thought I had lost my wallet, then reversing as many of those cancellations as I could an hour later when we found it in a bag of hardware that Sten had bought on Saturday, we headed ashore. Our first stop was Casco Viejo to pick up our visas at the French Embassy. We were both glad to have our passports back after a week long separation.
Casco Viejo is like the Beacon Hill of Panama City - old charming neighborhood, with grossly inflated housing prices.
Afterwards we headed over to Caladonia to get the boom bracket that we had made at Metalica Perez.
From there we grabbed a taxi to get some lunch. I said to the driver that we wanted to go to the Restaurant Beruit near the Marriott Hotel. He didn't understand me, so I simplified my request to "Marriott." He still didn't understand, so he called up his dispatcher and requested an English speaker then put me on the horn. I repeated that we wanted to go to the Marriott. The voice on the radio translated this to "Mahhriott." The driver nods, "Si, Mahhriott," in the tone of voice that said 'if you had just said that in the first place we could have skipped all this.' Sten and I exchanged knowing glances, both thinking of the stories our line handlers had told us of the same thing happening to them - going back and forth with taxi drivers only to have understanding dawn when they tweaked their pronunciation just slightly.
We easily found the restaurant we were looking for and after a tasty lunch headed over to Stuart's hostel to exchange a bag of books and use the free wifi. In the late afternoon we headed back to the boat to meet up with Roger from the yacht club in Colon to exchange our lines and get our deposit back. That completed, Sten and I had dinner. We don't often eat two meals out in a day, but with the month long passage across the Pacific coming up, where we'll have no option but to cook all of our meals every day, we're taking advantage of the huge variety of restaurants here in Panama City.
Wednesday was our moving day. Our house sale is closing on Friday. We're not there, so Sten's mom and my sister have been dealing with the sale for us and moving the last of our stuff out of the house. This is the best move I've ever had.
We have just enough of a wifi signal to skype from the boat so we were able to exchange some calls with Sten's mom about an issue that had popped up on the title and some closing details. In the afternoon Sten worked on installing the new boom bracket.
Late in the day I headed over to the fancy marina on the other side of the Causeway, loaded down with two big bags of laundry (mostly bedding from having the guys aboard the other night) only to learn that they don't have laundry machines. I'm not sure how that's possible, but now it is back to Plan A - taking it all to the hostel.
That night we went over the mall to pick up a generic grill grate for Sten to cut down to fit our grill and double sided business card paper for me to make more boat cards. Then we went to the movies and saw the new Spiderman. Between the baby crying behind us, the child down the row kicking its seat to make echoing noises, the thin plot, Kristen Dunst's vampire like eye-teeth (those things are freakish), and stirring dialogue like "you're my friend," "you're my best friend," we weren't terribly moved by the movie, but we sure did enjoy the $2.25 price and the frigid air conditioning.
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