Homestay in Boquete

After our stay at the beach, we started our 1 week intensive Spanish course in Boquete, a beautiful town in the Western Highlands of Panama. The week was exhausting. This may have been a sign that we were absorbing and processing a lot of Spanish. It may have also been because we had Gwendolyn on our hands full time. We alternated Gwendolyn care - whenever one of us was in class, the other would be bouncing, swinging, reading, singing, hiding, chasing - nearly always in a non-toddler-proof environment. All this compounded by the fact that we were still recovering from our terrible colds.

Some of our less good moments looked like this.

In hopes of rapidly improving our Spanish, we decided to spend this week in a homestay. Nuria kindly welcomed all of us into her home, she had a special fondness for the Wren. She was extremely friendly and extremely talkative, which did help our Spanish, if not our general exhaustion.

We're pretty sure that the best part of this homestay in Gwendolyn's eyes was Nuria's dog.

Open mouth greetings were a daily occurrence, which seemed to delight both parties.

Nuria's house looked out onto Volcan Baru. It was great to be in the highlands and to wear sweaters and jeans and to actually need blankets again at night.

Some More Beach

Finally, a new post! Or actually a very old one. It has been nearly 6 weeks since our Christmas trip to the beach, but we wanted to post a few pictures to catch up.


We spent 3 days at a hotel called Las Olas on the beach near David. It was great for us to get away for a bit.

Gwendolyn had a great time prancing about naked.

Discovering and rediscovering sand.

And aiding her father in the fine game of ping pong.

We were all nursing terrible colds during this time, what smiles you see are really overriding a lot.

Coughs and sniffles aside, this was a great few days.

A Black Sand Christmas

For the holidays, Rachel and Wren and I decided to leave Gamboa and head West--to Chiriqui. Our ultimate destination is an intensive Spanish program in Boquete, in the mountains. But for Christmas, we are at the beach.

This is Gwendolyn's second beach. The first was at the Black Sea, which was decidedly not black. This is Wren's first look at the Pacific Ocean, which is decidedly not pacific. The waves are HUGE. And here, the sand is black. Confusing!

"Uh, Mom, the sand is black."

Black sand makes black faces.

And black feet.

Our Christmas tree.

We are a little thin on presents, but we have the best present of all--a happy family. And here at the black sand beach in the middle of the tropics, we can happily daydream of a white Christmas.

Roots

Gwendolyn has discovered the picture book that Sam and Jess gave us last Christmas and has been studying it with great concentration. I've asked her who is in the pictures, and right away she identified "Tooobiii" (sing-song upward inflection of the "biii"). She didn't get anyone else, even Tulip ("Tuliii") whose name probably got said the most during our last visit. Pretty sure she doesn't recognize herself, both she and Maddie get lots of pointing and excited attention: "baby! baby!" We've been pointing out her different relatives and repeating their names. So, even though we won't see our families over Christmas, you'll all be very much with us in spirit!

Sick

We got struck by colds this weekend. Now all three of us are sniffling and sneezing. It seems that no one is immune, even Gwendolyn's stuffed animals. Gwendolyn patrols the house with a tissue in hand, wiping the nose of everyone she meets.

Sweet Sleep

In our struggles to get the Wren to sleep, Graciela introduced the idea of using the hammock, it now works for her for all Gwendolyn's afternoon naps. It worked for me, for the first time today!

Gamboa House

Finally, a few photos of the house. It's a duplex, we are renting the right half. Our borrowed STRI truck is in the driveway.

Living room from above.

Front bedroom.

Kitchen.

Downstairs bathroom.

Underneath the house - attempts at drying laundry in the rainforest without a dryer :).

Hanging Hammocks

Gwendolyn helps! (And for those of you worried about her safety - she survived this project without a single fall, amazing.)

Setting up house

So many little projects to be done as we set up house.

Gwendolyn - extremely involved and interested, if not completely helpful.

Diablos Rojos

Some more photos from our stuck-in-traffic-weekend. The privately owned Panamanian buses - or Diablos Rojos (red devils) - are really beautiful. Made over from old American school buses (that no doubt no longer pass US saftey regulations), these buses are a little terrifying in their near total disregard for basic traffic laws, their often black emissions, and the frequency with which they seem to breakdown. But they are gorgeous, and they are one of the first things that comes to mind when I think of real Panamanian art. I found a few articles online about how they are in peril from government plans to paint buses uniform colors that denote their route (Panama News, Panama Living Newsletter). But they still seem to be plentiful and they definitely make the long waits in traffic a lot more interesting and enjoyable.

Panama City

Gamboa is about 40 minutes outside of Panama City, and ideally we would go in once or at most twice a week. Lately, though, we've had so many logistics to take care of that David and I have been battling the chaos of the city nearly every day. Traffic jams, rude aggressive drivers, endless honking - we usually get lost at least once, start fighting with each other, and race home just in time to return to Gwen Wren before Graciela leaves.

This is a typical view of completely stopped traffic.

This Saturday we took Gwendolyn with us, and it was a much more relaxed trip. We did of course get stuck in gridlock. And get lost. But at least we were all together and we weren't racing against the clock. Gwendolyn started the trip like this (note her faithful friend).

A few hours of traffic and 1 cheese empanada later, she looked like this.

And finally like this.

Meanwhile David and I stayed in pretty good moods. David's driving is getting more and more Panamanian (read: effectively aggressive), we are beginning to learn our way around a bit better, and I kept us amused by taking pictures out of the window. It's hard to go wrong with ads like these - "the best of a man is in his interior" - indeed!