General Update

Things are busy in Panama, working on the website, preparing to leave for Costa Rica at the end of next week and just regular life stuff. Today was a free day for our team and I went to the mall in Panama City just to break up routine a little. Some of the things you encounter here in Panama are so strange. The cat-calls and honking of the horn (there's a difference between the traffic horn and the horn directed at any female) are an annoying part of life here. You see bars on the windows of run-down homes, high fences surrounding old buildings, barbed wire protecting people from I'm not sure what. The culture is sex driven - if a billboard lacks a mostly nude women, it's a rarity. At the mall, we always laugh at the mannequins with their HUGE chests, posed in disturbing positions (the one below is for a regular store that sells basically everything, including the kitchen sink - it is not for an underwear store). Yet in so many ways, it is a city like any other. The traffic flows across a sky-scraper skyline. It has areas that neither you or the locals venture into as well as new development with its unique architecture. And I still have those moments: pinch me, am I really in Panama, living a few degrees north of the equator?