Panama

Yesterday, well after I waved goodbye to Tori and some new friends in Boquete, Panama and returned to Panama City, my heart felt a few tinges of sadness and pangs of sorrow.

Boquete, after all, is a small paradisical town nestled within a bowl of verdant mountains, overlooked by a giant volcano and bisected by a wild, rocky river. Continue reading »

“You know, Tori,” I said one day while strolling through the peaceful and colorful town of Boquete, Panama, “this is the first town outside of the United States I have visited that I could actually imagine living in.”

Now, that is saying quite a bit considering that my hometown of Fort Collins, Colorado — which was proclaimed by Money magazine as the best place to live in the U.S. last year — sets a pretty high standard for good quality of life. Indeed, last year every time I left the Fort to somewhere more than a few days, I’d miss my little town in the Front Range and sometimes wonder why I even bother to travel anymore when just about everything I enjoy is right there where I live.

Well, Boquete provided some answers. Continue reading »

Improving our Spanish was one of the primary motivations for going to Panama in the first place. But we were only on our third or fourth day when Tori made an observation.

“My brain is FRIED,” she said during a 15-minute recess. “I think taking six hours a day of classes is too much.”

I could see what she meant. I only had three or four hours a day — mostly private tutoring — and while they were very helpful, I’m not sure if I would have wanted to do more than that especially if we were taking classes every weekday of the week. Which is exactly what we doing. I don’t think even in college I had six hours of classes a day. Okay, in elementary and high school I did, but the pace of those were decidedly more relaxed especially since they did not entail listening, responding, reading, and talking every 10 seconds or so. Continue reading »

“One thing I noticed,” I remarked to my travel buddy shortly after going for a run during a glorious morning in Boquete, “is that dogs here do not bark.”

Dogs that do not bark? I could tell from the look that Tori gave me that she was a little skeptical. I might as well have told her that the birds also don’t chirp, the cows don’t moo, and Tickle Me Elmo doesn’t wiggle his belly even more than Shakira, but those would all be false statements. Whereas, I swore that I had already encountered five perros, and none of them had even let out a whimper. Nada. Continue reading »

I’ll be honest — one month ago, I really had no idea that high-quality coffee came from the mountains of Panama. Nor did I really care. I drink about three cups of coffee a year, and that includes caramel frappuccinos that is more like a desert than a drink. When I go into a coffee shop I order something like a Moroccan Mint or English tea. Even on the rare occasion I’m in a Starbucks (mainly to use their free wi-fi in, say, Mountain View, for example), I’d order a shaken iced green tea, size tall (small).

I sort of entered a whole new world, then, shortly after meeting up with Tori down in Boquete, which apparently is to coffee as Bordeaux is to wine. If Tori — a true coffee aficionado — hadn’t already made it perfectly clear that the world’s best coffee came from this region, then Carlos — Café Ruiz’s most excellent tour guide who we met through Habla Ya — did in no uncertain terms. Continue reading »