Panama city

My friends pick me up from the airport - it is fantastic to see them and we spend some short but powerful quality time together (but I'm not going to share too much personal stuff here on the internet, since everyone and their dog can theoretically read it...).

Panama city is an Eldorado for runners and cyclists. There's a beautiful route along the coast which is highly frequented by lots of energetic looking people  moving and sweating. I got up at 5:30 to go for a 15k run, but it the 27 degrees prove to be an extra challenge.

I run by the fish market, where workers are busy unloading huge blocks of ice. One of them calls me "mi reyna", which I am sure he also says to a one-eyed toothless and foul-smelling witch, but it still works on me - I haven't been here long enough. Dutch people tend to not smother each other (let alone strangers) with compliments, so for the moment, I smile and move on with an extra spring in my step.

In the afternoon, I take a chain of bus to the Panama Canal (as I am sure everyone will ask about them). The bus system is very interesting, you enter and get a chip (like in a casino) and when you leave the bus, you return the chip together with a couple of coins. I fail to work out the function of the coin, and don't feel like playing the role of the stupid tourist, so it will most probably forever be a mystery...

On the final bus to the Miraflores locks, I make a friend: Julio. He treats me to my first Panamaian fast food, by practically forcing a bag of Pinocchio's on me, together with a can of strawberry Fanta, and not taking a "no gracias" for an answer. This will happen to me quite a few times, people here are incredibly generous and unfortunately at the same time incredibly unaware of how terrible the stuff they eat actually is for them (and me). There is a lot of fastfood all over Latin America, and you can see it in people's body shapes. You don't need to be a clairvoyant to know that this continent will soon have a huge problem as their population will run into more and more of the overweight related problems. A friend recently told me that Mexico has now officially taken over the unfortunate crown of having the fattest population on the planet. Oh my.

For now, Julio and I end up having a very nice conversation. He actually works at the other locks in the middle of the country and has lots of interesting things to say about the canal. For example that he's not worried about Nicaragua building her own canal (or rather, the Chinese build their own canal in Nicaragua) - as Panama is and always will be better. They are currently working on enlarging the whole thing by a massive scale, so he might be right.

I arrive at the canal just in time to see a huge ship go through the locks. The locks are 33,5m wide, the ship 34m - which makes it a so-called Panamax. I might be mistaken, as I was suffering from massive brain freeze thanks to my granizado, but it certainly looked like a close shave. Thank god it was a male captain who could park - in fact a canal pilot who works for the locks and replaces the captain while the ship goes through the passage. I just imagined him parking his car in a parking lot, bored beyond belief, after a day of moving towering ships through the locks with about less than 30cm to spare on each side.

Ships have to pay 40 hours in advance and prices range from 36 cents for a swimmer who was crazy enough to swim the entire length of the canal (the announcer dutifully explained it was a rather skinny man) to about 120,000 USD for a Panamax. Apparently this is still a lot cheaper than going around the entire continent - considering the passage through Panama takes only about 10 hours (unless you swim, I guess).

a lot to write home about...

So, Central America.

People who know me have no doubt that Latin America has "bad idea" written all over it for me. In big, blinking letters. My dislike for salsa music is second only to my dislike for coriander (cilantro) - both of which are about as easy to avoid here as a Catholic priest in Rome.

The other issue Latin America and I have is that I consider myself to be a vegetarian, a concept constantly challenged and crushed by the Latin America diet. Luckily I actually enjoy eating meat, so I have decided to take a blood-thirsty break from my self-imposed abstinence.

In many ways however, Central America and I are a match made in heaven. Wonderfully warm people, an often hot climate, breathtaking nature, plenty of wildlife, great food, to name but a few. And, hopefully, a kickstart to my dormant Spanish. No one forces you as charmingly/ruthlessly to dust off your rusty Spanish as the Americas (minus Brazil, of course). Just now, in the airport in Bogota, I heard an announcement asking Mr Li Wang Chan to immediately go to Gate 51, all in fast-forward Spanish. And only in Spanish. Given his name, I would at least hesitate to assume that Spanish is his first language...

Very occasionally, there will be an announcement in English, but as these announcements go, you can only understand the English one if you have already paid very good attention to the Spanish one. Is a gold medal in a speed mumbling contest a hard requirement to get a job behind an airport microphone? Is there a global training course for this? Where the teachers go: "No, I still understood three words out of eight, say it again!" 

Overall, I have already heard some fantastic variations of what is considered Spanish: on the plane here, my neighbour, when asked whether he wanted a beverage, gave a somewhat disgruntled hum - upon which the stewardess stoically handed him an orange juice - and to my utter surprise, she was right! Maybe stewardesses get a special training in grunt interpretation? Same school, possibly?