We woke up this morning at 6:20, got ready and headed out to a nearby coffee shop for breakfast. We are not in an apartment with a kitchen in Panama City. Instead, we have a hotel style room with en suite bathroom in a youth hostel. This particular hostel is heavy on the youth with loud music, a bar and pool on the roof and lots of activities. Thank goodness for earplugs because those kids were partying late last night.
We thought we were going to hike up to Ancon Hill today to see the flora and fauna and this mysterious danger noodle thing, which we have since Googled and is apparently a slang term for a snake. Who knew? One thing I inherited from my crazy mother was an irrational fear of snakes, so I wasn’t so keen on the idea after finding out about that. Then of course, there was the heat today. 91 degrees with 59% humidity and a Real Feel of 101. Hike up a hill? I’ll pass.
We decided instead to walk around the old town area of Panama City called Casco Viejo, which is where our hostel is. We downloaded a self-guided tour and walked the roughly 30 historical sites in the morning. Thankfully, a good portion of those sites were welcoming Catholic churches with a solid air conditioning budget. It was surely needed.
With just a few sites left and approaching the noon hour, we decided a welcome respite might be the rooftop pool and taco shop of our hostel. So we finished out our tour and hustled back for some relaxation by the pool.
We headed straight to the roof in our street clothes knowing that Nathan needed to get his lunch on. We each ordered three tacos from their menu and a drink. We waited for a while and the food came out, but we still had no drinks. Being all relaxed from the beach, we just ate our delicious tacos knowing we could rectify the whole no drink thing when our waitress came back around.
When I got to my fish taco, something was not quite right. It was a white fish, but instead of being white and hot, it was more grey or clear and warmish. I told Nathan that I thought the fish was not quite done and he had the waitress come over and in our wretched Spanglish tried to explain the problem. She took the taco away and in a few minutes brought out a smoking hot white one. We also reminded her about our drinks and she brought them out shortly thereafter.
We could tell that she felt bad about the whole thing, but we weren’t in a hurry or really had a care in the world, so the fact that they made it right was just fine by us. But after a few moments, she brought us each out a small portion of flan. The waitress was young, but either her English is not good or she’s too bashful to use it. She typed into her phone that the dessert was for the delay on the taco and drinks and had her phone translate it into English for us. We tried to assure her we were fine and grateful.
Fully satisfied with our taco lunch, we headed down to our room to put on sunscreen and swimsuits, then back up to the top level for relaxing and reading by the pool.
We have been flying through Panama City for three years now, and last year our timing was right for a tour of the Panama Canal and museum. We have stayed in contact with our guide from that tour in 2018, Eddie, and so when I knew that we were passing through again, I reached out to him. Would he and his wife be available for a get together? They were, so we rounded out an awesome Panama City day with dinner with Eddie and Maya.
Tomorrow after breakfast we head to the airport and fly home. We’ve had a great vacation, but these bug bitten legs are begging to go home, where they can recover from all the fun.