Panama Canal!

After spending a few days working tirelessly to arrange our upcoming 10 day venture to the Caribbean, we finally had some time to see Panama itself. Last night we walked around the area that we're located in. It was quite an adventure trying to pull together a greek salad, but we made it happen. Two visits to the vegetable market (cucumber and rosemary), a trip to one supermarket (beans and beans), a trip to another supermarket (feta and lettuce) and viola! A respectable greek salad. So many greens in one place! It's been awhile since we've seen such a wonderful cornucopia of vegetables. Another night of pizza or pasta just didn't seem to appeal to either of us. Nothing like spending 4 hours tracking down the ingredients you could normally just pick up at the store. The only reason we knew it was possible was that it's Panama City! The local beer, Atlas, costs $0.60. And even better, the import beer, Hamm's, costs $0.60. Guess which one we went with. We even convinced a Australia immigrant from Britain that it was wonderful. It just speaks to the beauty of Hamm's. No other Milwaulkee beer had the hutzpah to decide that Panama would be it's big export market, but Hamm's pulled it together and made it happen. Happy days for us to be drinking a great yard beer.

So this morning was a fabulous morning. I may have tricked Erin a bit, saying, "Let's go check out the fish market in the morning."

She acquised with a classic roll of the eye. I woke her up at 5:30am. Haha. Luckily she wasn't too mad. But it was a beautiful morning. We watched the sunrise over the new city center, enormous highrises giving perspective to dawn's rosy red fingers. (Side note: name the author of that phrase.) There's a long park bordering the pacific ocean, full of runners, bikers and roller bladers. We grabbed a cup of coffee and just enjoyed the entire experience.

The fish market we went to was a bit disappointing, compared to some of the others we've seen, but it was fun nonetheless. The process of transforming bass, barracuda, shrimp, squid, crab and other sorts of sea creatures, palatable on a plate but terrifying in their aquatic world,

into edible delicacies is also something that's fascinating. Watching a man fillet his umpteenth fish in 3 seconds flat is actually a sight to see. He executes it with such familiarity and precision that it makes you think it's an easy operation. He even does it with a dull knife.

A quick walk back to the hostel, some eggs sunnyside up and pancakes (breakfast of champs), a hop on a bus or two and we're suddenly at the Panama Canal, Miraflores locks. We had been told to get there early, so we arrived around 9:15 or so. It was just in time to see a medium sized cargo ship passing through. We stayed for an hour or two, but never saw another ship even on the horizon. Locks closed, boats go up, locks open, boat goes out.

It's a remarkable simple process on an amazing scale. The amount of water that moves is just incredible. It makes the gigantic lake look like a swimming pool, which in reality is exactly what it is. It's just an enormous, man-made lake serving it sole purpose of sluicing water into the locks on each side of the continental divide. They literally cut the continental divide in two at the Gaillard Cut, which caused insane amount of difficulty for both the french and the americans. Well, to be technically correct, it was an administrative nightmare for the americans and a game of russian roulette for the workers who actually did the majority of the work.

But the scale, man, the scale! Simply incredible to think of the work that went through to make it all happen. There was a serious plan in the 70's to build a sea-level canal using nuclear bombs, but that was shot down for some sort of environmental fallout reason. Now, Panama has taken the initiative to expand the canal, which we were told about extensively. "Just wait! In 2015, there will be a whole new series of locks taking bigger and longer ships through the panama canal." Apparently it's cheaper to send things from Japan to the US west coast, truck or rail them to the US east coast, and then ship them to Europe. Who knew these types of global transportation issues were the driver of a $5.25 billion dollar expansion with dubious results? The pandora's box of globalism has clearly been opened.

Returning from the canal, we proceeded to head to a number of bureau de exchanges. The issue is that we needed euros. Good luck finding them. A third day of logistical nightmares lead us through hours of walking around, but the end goal was achieved. We are set to fly tomorrow and will be back in a bit. You likely won't hear from us in the next couple of weeks, but hold you breath because it should definitely be worth it.

T