Greg's Haitian Adventure 8: Back to Panama

I'm finally posting the last chapter of my Haiti odyssey from this July.

The flight back from Haiti to Panama was really cold. I'd gotten used to Haiti's lowland tropical climate (which really wasn't that unbearably hot while I was there), so the stark air-conditioned plane was hard on my body. I spent the latter part of the flight with my hands tucked in my shirt to keep warm.

Once we arrived in Panama I was thankful for the brief bit of tropical stickiness I felt on the walk down the boarding chute, though this relief was quickly snuffed out when I entered the ACed airport.

After more than a month away from my family, and already a few days of travel under my belt for the return trip, I was not eager to spend another night in a strange bed. I frantically rushed about the Panama airport looking for a last-minute flight to Bogota that I might hop on instead of my scheduled flight the next day. I did indeed find a flight, but it was boarding at that moment and they wouldn't let me change my ticket on such short notice. I resigned myself to another day traveling after my brief glimmer of hope, and found an expensive shared cab outside the airport.

The cab ride was atmospheric if nothing else. I was with an English-speaking couple who talked the entire ride. The guy was fat and somewhat ethnic-looking, with a weird accent. The girl had the nasal, awful, piercing voice of certain Corn Belt suburbanites or small towners--think Roseanne Barr's TV character. In the course of their nonstop conversation that I couldn't help catching every detail of, I discovered that the guy was from Belize (hence the weird accent accompanied by obvious native-speaker comfort with the English language), and it seemed as if he were employed in some shady sector that entailed long trips through Mexico while his girlfriend waited for him in resort towns. She kept pressing to know about what went down on these trips, and he kept telling her that she knew he couldn't tell her about his work. The guy also kept joking about a Jamaican they'd met on the flight, whom he was sure was not really a farmer but rather a narcotrafficker. I mused to myself that the Belizean must think everyone was a shady narco, since he himself was.

This couple really had nothing pertinent to say, and I surmised that they had no interesting thoughts in their heads. They talked exclusively about frivolous shit, and kept referencing the same things over and over, the way you do when you're with someone you don't know but might be interested in sleeping with, and you talk uncomfortably just to fill the dead space between you. But they had been traveling together for at least a few months, if not more, and their conversation never got past the superficial. Nevertheless, it seems that empty-headed people do feel and hurt like the rest of us, because they both expressed jealousy whenever an ex-lover came up in the conversation. I guess even if you don't have profound thoughts or anything to talk about, you can love another person (or at least not like the idea of them screwing someone else).

Another thing that sprang to my mind was an existential question I've often pondered: what makes some people intellectually curious, and others not? More specifically, my wife and I have a few friends that show an interesting combination of curiosity and lack thereof. On the one hand, when they're with us, they are very interested in discussing and learning new things and thinking about how things work. But their lack of general knowledge or cultural capital makes me imagine that they aren't very intellectually curious in their other day-to-day endeavors. How could this be? When I don't know or understand something, I have like this burning need to look into it and obsess over it until I have learned about it. This is the attitude I usually see in the friends I'm thinking of. But then why don't they have an encyclopedic knowledge of the world? Maybe they sometimes turn off their minds. I think TV and iEverythings and the like must have a role in the dampening of our collective curiosity. It's easy to get distracted from the business of living and learning with so many entertainment options beckoning to us at once.

Finally the insipid couple got out of the taxi at a very elegant hotel. More evidence for a narco-related profession; how do two people who have no discernible intellectual merits, don't speak Spanish, and who have spent the past months traveling around Mexico have the money to stay in an upscale Panama City hotel?

I, on the other hand, was not bound for an elegant hotel in Panama City's endless swath of coastal luxury high-rises but rather for a hostel in the city's colonial center. There still remained a lot of posh urban landscape to pass by yet though, and I marveled at the wealth surrounding me. Who lived in these places? Where did the poor live, or even just the normal people? Perhaps much of the luxury property belongs to foreigners or out-of-towners, people who are earning in dollars and not staying much in their Panama apartments. Otherwise it's difficult for me to explain how a small Central American economy that's only come into its own recently can boast a city full of huge skyscrapers with few people walking the streets and few lights on in the windows.

Another cultural trait that sunk in for me was the Panamanian love for salsa music. The radio in the cab was sounding nonstop classic salsa, and there were ads and billboards everywhere for big-name acts in concert. Hell, this is the country where Ruben Blades is a government minister!

Finally I got to the hostel where I'd reserved a bed online a few days prior. It was nothing special--neither the ultra-chic, spiffy-clean look of a newer hostel catering to young people, nor the absolute filth and decadence of a lower grade of hostel. I checked in and went straight to bed in a room shared with maybe eight other beds. It was a bit stuffy and smelly, but it served my purposes.

The next morning I got up pretty early, showered in silence so as not to awake my hung-over hostelmates, and strolled around Panama's Old City. This is not to be confused with the original colonial city a few miles down the coast, which I believe was destroyed by some natural or martial event, and whose ruins are now preserved as a sort of park. Anyway, my hostel was on the edge of the nicer part of the Old City, where well-restored offices and hotels give way to shady, run-down ruins and tenements. In general the Old City struck me for the prevalence of normal people living normal lives there, sending their kids to school, hanging the wash out to dry, etc.

It is a much more authentic and vibrant neighborhood than Cartagena's Old Quarter in Colombia, which is now occupied almost entirely by hotels, restaurants, and foreigners. Unlike Santo Domingo's Old City though, which feels above all like just a working-class area where the buildings happen to be 500 years old, Panama's old part felt on the verge of being gentrified. As I said, regular people continued living their lives in rundown old buildings, but they seemed to me like the last tenacious resistance entrenched in hostile territory, surrounded by both severe decay and nascent gentrification, and surely soon to be pushed out of the neighborhood.

I was especially impressed by Panama City's embrace of elegant decay as a kind of art form.

There are a few churches that have been reduced by earthquakes or neglect to roofless shells bounded by their original brick walls. But instead of either refurbishing them or knocking them down to make way for other construction, they've been turned into small urban parks, with benches, cafes, and cultural events.

There are also more traditional, full-fledged garden parks, like this square.

As I walked around I had dreams of buying and rehabbing one of the houses I saw.

It was two floors, with outside balconies and a zinc roof. The house was on the edge of what I'd consider to be the Old City proper, and faced onto a park with a tumbled section of colonial defensive wall and a lot of winos lying about.

I bet in a few years the neighborhood will be a hot investment spot for wealthy foreigners with money to blow. They're already setting up free Wifi spots:

The city also seems to be trying to renovate the seaside Malecon, which is pretty run-down. I believe residents of the Old City successfully rebuffed plans to build a coastal highway, which would block the view of the ocean, but I think a lot of seaside property has remained in limbo, neither well-maintained nor definitively torn down.

The time finally came to start making my way to the airport. Unlike the prior night, when I didn't feel comfortable navigating an unfamiliar and perhaps dangerous city, today I was to take a public bus out to my destination. The ride would cost me 25 cents US (un cuarter, as they say in Panama) as opposed to $20!

I picked up my bag at the hostel and set off on foot. From the Old City I passed through neighborhoods built in maybe the 1920s, with lots of rundown houses and small businesses like barbershops. It's how I imagine the non-colonial parts of Havana. The hand-painted signs were a far cry from the glitzy highrises I'd seen the night before. I guess this is where normal people live in Panama City. You can also see the Afro-Carribean Santeria influence in this area.

And "normal people" in Panama seem to be pretty varied. I saw people of all colors walking up and down the streets, with no clear race/class distinctions of certain colored people doing all the buying, or all the serving, or all the sweeping. I even saw a fair amount of indigenous people in colorful outfits.

I eventually got to a pedestrian street of big stores built perhaps between the 20s and 50s. There was an air of faded glamour, sooty cement facades that at one point must have been pristine white or sleek grey. The stores were mainly of the tacky variety--dollar stores, small grocers and minimarts, junky clothing. It reminded me of Uptown in Chicago, or State Street in the early 90s when it was all seedy shops selling electronics, shoes, and (bootleg?) clothes.

The bus left from a big roundabout, and the ride took about an hour 15 minutes--not much slower than the prior night's cab ride. The bus was a converted, repainted schoolbus from the US. I'd been advised to take the Metrobus, which is a more modern, unified system of municipal buses, but at the roundabout a guy pointed me to one of the shabbier buses as the right one to reach the airport. We passed first through the high-end part of town that my annoying taximates had gotten off at the night before, then through a more lower-middle-class-looking area of unremarkable cement apartment buildings, similar to much of Bogota but with more low-rise strip malls, at least along the big street our bus was plying. Eventually we reached an area dominated by warehouses and light industry, with many signs indicating a major Chinese investment presence. Finally the bus left me at a point from which I could see the airport at the other end of a sprawling vacant field I had to cross to get there.

The airport was clearly not designed to be entered by foot, and I had to pass through a lot of parking lots and driveways that I was probably supposed to be prohibited from walking over. There was, however, a nice sculptural homage to Panama's indigenous archeological heritage.

Security at the airport was fast, thorough, and amiable. It was much better than at any other airport I've been to, which tend to range from very lax to neurotically invasive. Security procedures at US airports seem to create the illusion of effectiveness by lots of aimless busy-ness and inconvenience, but ultimately they're not very thorough.

And there I was, set for the last leg of my trip home to Colombia. I settled into a chair at my gate, with my toxic but sweet Domino's pizza and chocolate chip cookie I'd bought for breakfast, and I wrote the outline for this blog post.

Goodbye Panama City. Goodbye, elegant decay.