Our lives here are fairly ordinary.
We do try to find interesting things to do each day even if it’s just getting out for a long walk, riding the metro or revisiting favorite spots for ceviche, raspado, a hike or even picking up wine and groceries. We like exploring shops and regularly find new interesting ones. For example yesterday we found two fruterias almost next door to one another. Both are on the street behind us, closer to the water and both had a fine selection of produce with many more available varieties than we have found at the local supermarket, the Super 99, or even the Super Kosher. One of the fruterias was a fooler. It looked like a small shop at the entrance but occupied space not visible from the street and was actually quite large – I call this one Whole Foods. This store had Asian vegetables and micro greens, parsnips, asparagus, red and yellow carrots, arugula and many more vegetable types not found elsewhere. And it all looked fresh! We put this store on our shopping route.
We find simple things like this can be very entertaining.
We eat simply too. Trying local small restaurants is one of the things we enjoy most but we cook and eat at home quite a lot too. We have had tasty home-cooked meals featuring roasted chicken, meatloaf, beans with sausage, smoked pork chops or homemade soup—with lots of salad too of course. Many of the local supermarket selections are very similar to those at home. In particular though the avocados and potatoes available here are especially good. The time I baked meatloaf, I made the requisite mashed potatoes too. Both us could not believe richness and flavor of the potatoes (papas)! By the way, Stan just added they may have tasted so good because we had not them in over two months. Make no mistake, we eat well but we are not overdoing it. Neither of us want to leave here packing a couple of extra pounds.
Speaking of food, that reminds me. On most days living with Stan is just plain fun. It is always interesting! It’s no wonder we’ve been married nearly 47 years. Part of my constant fascination with him is that I never know what he’s going to say or do. He picks at random children on the bus and gets them to laugh. He taunts the cashiers in the grocery store and gets them to laugh. He makes me laugh every day too. Everyone knows both of us are still trying to learn Spanish. We practice Duolingo every day—Stan has a run of 95 consecutive days of lessons completed so far. We practice out loud as often as possible. We try to repeat the names of streets and stores; we read the messages on billboards and we try to shop for food in Spanish. We even try to speak to neighbors and clerks in stores and restaurants in Spanish. Still it is so difficult and confusing. Google Translate is our friend. One day as I was making our grocery list Stan said to me, “Do we need to get some Zihuatanejo?” “What???” “You know, carrots.” Stunned I asked, “Where in the heck did you get that?” He answered, “Shawshank Redemption, of course!” Carrots in Spanish is zanahoria. But for us they will forever more be Zihuatanejo.
We have a big trip planned to kick-off next week so we decided to lay low the next few days. We will go to our gym, get sun by the pool and just do local things. Today we decided we’d treat ourselves to a fancy late lunch. After a workout, we showered and actually put on decent clothing. That means Stan wore a golf shirt and nice shorts and I chose a sundress. It hardly matters what we wear – the heat and humidity wilt our clothing in short order. We had planned to walk to La Vespa but heavy rain made us UBER the one-mile trip.
We chose La Vespa because it’s contemporary, sits on the water and is housed in the JW Marriott. Today we wanted something very special.
As in old-school Italian restaurants men in jackets attending the entry greeted us. One met us with an umbrella as we passed through the open area between the hotel and the ocean front restaurant. We were seated at a table with white linens on the covered open-air patio overlooking the sea.
Another part of Panama City sat on the horizon to our left and the open water sparkled on our right. The sun peeking through the clouds virtually lighted up the tall buildings across the bay turning them a brilliant white. The view of the city with overhanging voluminous clouds and the calm sea was picture-perfect. The scene alone was worth the visit but our lunch and glass of white wine made it over the top. It was lovely to relax, people-watch, and enjoy nice service. It was a quite civilized afternoon.
OMG – I just died laughing at the zihuatanejo story. I can hear this conversation happening as if I were there.
Coco, your comments made us laugh too!