Category Archives: Living Abroad

January 11, 2012 · 3:41 pm

I Stand Corrected (Though Not Humbly)

Ah, the pitfalls of learning another language. . . In yesterday’s post I incorrectly translated the slogan on the Super Barú supermarket sign. It reads, “Esta mejor que nunca.” I took it to mean “It’s better than nothing.” It actually means, “It’s better than ever.” Of course that makes a lot more sense than what I said but not nearly as funny. “Esta mejor que nada” means “It’s better than nothing.”

One can only hope a literate vandal with a sense of humor sees the sign and sneaks in there some dark night and changes nunca for nada. I’ll keep my eye on the sign and let you know if it happens.

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Filed under Learning a new language, Living Abroad, Living in Panama, Retirement Abroad

January 10, 2012 · 3:34 pm

Slogan Needs Work

The contents of my freezer looked pretty skimpy this morning when I opened it to take something out to thaw for dinner tonight. Grocery shopping here in Panama is similar to, but not the same as, it is in the States.

I do my major grocery shopping in David since there are only a couple of small “Chinos” here in Boquerón. “Chinos” are convenience stores which, throughout Panama are mostly owned by Chinese. In David there are four supermarkets: El Rey, Romero (which is owned by El Rey), Super 99 (owned by Panama’s president Ricardo Martinelli) and Super Barú. There is also a PriceSmart which is Panama’s answer to Costco. There are a couple of other chain supermarkets in Panama but the ones I’ve mentioned are the ones that are here.

You can’t do all your shopping at any one supermarket. El Rey, which is the biggest here, could stand shoulder to shoulder with almost any supermarket in the United States. In fact, you can buy a lot of the same brand names here in Panama as you can in the States though you’ll pay a little more for brand names you recognize. But sometimes the extra money is well spent. For example, peanut butter. I’m sorry, but nobody anywhere else in the world makes better tasting (to American palates, anyway) peanut butter than Jiff, Skippy and Peter Pan. Nor does anyone make better tomato paste than Contadena or Hunt’s. For the most part I buy more locally made products and do fine with them but some things just can’t be substituted.

Another thing one soon learns about shopping in Panama is this…if you see something you like on the shelves BUY IT NOW! There’s a very real chance it won’t be there when you might want it later on. If there are three of whatever you like, take TWO. I always leave one for someone else.

A lot of Panamanian businesses have a very tenuous grasp of the concept of marketing. Perhaps you’ve bought something several times in a store and now, for some strange reason you can’t find it any more. You might find a manager and ask why you can’t find your favorite item any more. They will often tell you with a straight face, and mean it, “Oh, we don’t carry that any more because it was too hard to keep on the shelves.” Well, GEE ZUS!!! That’s the whole idea of retail marketing. Find an item that people want and then sell the shit out of it. Why is that concept so hard to grasp?

As I said, you can’t get everything you want at any one single supermarket. I get most of my non-perishable items, canned goods, etc., at El Rey. But if I want to get Kikkoman soy sauce I have to go down the block and across the street to Super Barú. They stock it, El Rey doesn’t though you can get Kikkoman Teriyaki Baste and Marinade at Rey. Barú is about half the size of El Rey and there are a few other things they stock that you can’t get at El Rey. After a few months you get to know which store you have to go to to get certain things.

Each of the supermarkets has a produce section, El Rey’s is the largest and most attractive, but if you want really fresh fruits and veggies at prices that aren’t extortionate, you do that kind of shopping at small, roadside stands that specialize in produce.

Anyway, I needed to pack in a supply of meat. That’s right, MEAT. Fruits and vegetables are fine as far as they go but I also like a slab of bleeding dead cow meat on my plate now and then. The different markets have differing qualities of dead cow, pig and poultry. The ground beef at El Rey, though, listed as low-fat, is just that. There’s almost no fat at all and it doesn’t make for the tastiest hamburgers. Everywhere in Panama beef is really TOUGH. It’s all grass-fed cattle with no feed-lot grain feeding to fatten them up and it’s the fat in the meat that makes it tender.

I’ve found that PriceSmart has about the best ground beef in the area and they have very good cuts of pork and poultry at very competitive prices though not necessarily lower than at the supermarkets. So that’s where I went today. PriceSmart is on the Inter-American highway a couple of miles outside of David and a couple of hundred yards from the Chiriqui Mall. There’s a road connecting the two about a hundred yards in from the highway. The bus stops at the mall but not at PriceSmart so you have to get off at the mall and walk over to PriceSmart.

At the corner of the road that connects the two complexes there is a billboard promoting the Super Barú market at the mall. It’s a small store compared to the one in David. Maybe a third its size and really small compared to El Rey, Romero or Super 99. I couldn’t believe the slogan on the sign for the Chiriqui Mall Super Barú. It read…

“Esta Mejor Que Nunca!” For those of you who don’t understand Spanish, it means, “It’s Better Than Nothing!”

Maybe I’m wrong, but I think someone needs to rethink that slogan. It sure doesn’t do much to inspire confidence.

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December 29, 2011 · 11:14 am

All My Neighbors Say “Hello”

As my regular readers know, I live in the small pueblo of Boquerón, Panama, in Chiriqui Province west of the country’s third largest city, David. I rent a house in a middle-class neighborhood where my neighbors are mono-lingual. They all speak nothing but Spanish. When I first moved in and I’d see them on my walks to the bus stop we’d exchange the normal greeting of “Buenos Dias,” or “Hola.” But recently I’ve noticed that almost all of them have stopped saying that and they say, “Hello,” instead. I can’t quite put my finger on when I first became aware of this change, but I find it rather amusing. I still answer them with the traditional “Buenos, como esta?” though, and if I stop to chat it is always in Spanish, of course.

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December 25, 2011 · 3:36 pm

Christmas Eve In Boquerón, Panama

I LOVE fireworks. Who doesn’t? Well, my old dog, Penny. Just ask her. You like fireworks, girl?

I guess not.

I’ve seen some pretty good fireworks in my time. Of course the ones when you’re a kid are always spectacular since they’re such a new experience. As you grow older they have to get better. In the States, of course, most fireworks are professionally done. Oh, there are firecrackers. Cherry bombs and M-80s were wonderful when we could get them since they were illegal and cost most of a week’s allowance. But what fun!

Fireworks are a big part of celebrations in New Orleans. I remember one New Year’s Eve out at a girlfriend’s house in Metaire the whole neighborhood was setting off fireworks and the smoke was actually so thick it was like a fog between the houses. And when the World Fair was running in New Orleans they closed each night with a fireworks display. Most evenings I’d go sit out on the glider swing in the back yard and watch them light up the sky over the “Moon Walk” down by the French Quarter.

The Bi-Centennial display in Chicago in 1976 was pretty impressive. I was running a 300-passenger sight seeing boat seen here on the cover of a Chicago Yellow Pages.

Of course I had to work that night and we had the boat filled to capacity but it was still fun watching them from the water.

Without a doubt the best fireworks display I EVER saw was in Cannes, France, for their Bi-Centennial Bastille Day celebration. The fireworks were set off from three different locations: a barge moored out in the bay, one on a hillside to the west of the town and one from a hillside behind the town. When the displays went off overhead from the three locations at the same time it gave one a sensation of vertigo. And the whole thing was done synchronized to music. They’re big on that in France. Every year during the month of August there is an international fireworks competition in the village of Juan les Pins, adjacent to Antibes, and those displays are also choreographed to music.

Here in Panama fireworks are a big part of the Christmas Eve celebration. Why? I have no idea. But there are fireworks stands all over the area. The other day I went to the Chiriqui Mall and a huge, inflatable tent had been set up out front selling KaBoom “Fuegos Articifiales.”

For the past week kids in the neighborhood have been setting off firecrackers every now and them Some were definitely in the cherry bomb and M-80 category. LOUD. Then, last night things began to heat up. Sitting on my front porch you could hear firecrackers going off all around. Just listen to this. There’s no picture, but you can hear the noise. It must have sounded a little like this at the start of the “shock and awe” part of the invasion of Iraq.

That went on non-stop for well over an hour.

Now, my neighborhood is solidly middle class. There are no McMansions here. Only 25% of the families own a car. These are either retired Panamanians or solid working folks. What happened at midnight I can only speculate on how they were able to afford such a display. I suspect that the different families might have pooled their money to be able to afford what went on for a good 15 to 20 minutes non-stop. This is just a glimpse.

I thought it was quite impressive considering it was entirely funded out of the neighbors own pockets.

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December 21, 2011 · 10:22 pm

Feliz Hanukwanzmas One And All

Well, it’s that time of year again, and I’m not talking about the Republican Presidential Primary Debates. I’m talking about Hanukwanzmas. That time when people of good will make fun of each other’s traditions. For example Sarah (The Queen of the I-Quitarod) Palin AND Faux Gnus have been criticizing President Obama’s family Christmas card this year.

Palin told Fox News that she found it “odd” that the card emphasizes the dog instead of traditions like “family, faith and freedom.” She also said that Americans are able to appreciate “American foundational values illustrated and displayed on Christmas cards and on a Christmas tree.”

Of course the fact that NO president in the past century has used the word “Christmas” matters not one whit to the true-believer Tali-Christian. Palin sees the season like this:

I hope John McCain realizes that there is a new and special layer of hell set up just for him for unleashing this woman on an unsuspecting American populace. (It’s one level higher than where Five Deferment Dick Cheny is going to spend eternity being water-boarded even after realizing that it IS torture.) Anyway, when is this woman’s fifteen minutes going to be up?

I actually like the Hanukwanzmas season except for one thing. I loathe and despise the piped-in Muzak Hanukwanzmas songs that it is impossible to escape from every time you enter a store or public building like an airport terminal. When I’m in charge of everything things are going to change drastically. Piped-in Hanukwanzmas music will only be allowed to be played from 6 p.m. until midnight Hanukwanzmas Eve. Anyone violating this rule will be eviscerated and their innards will be used to decorate the Hanukwanzmas tree in Rockefeller Center like tinsel garlands.Yesterday, Tuesday, December 20th, I went into the El Rey supermarket in David to pay my light bill and was aurally assaulted by “Rudolph The Red Nose Reindeer,” in ENGLISH no less. Can you imagine the uproar that would be heard around the redneck states back in the Great White North if they played Christmas Songs in Spanish? Thankfully I haven’t heard “Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer” or any of the Alvin and the Chipmunk songs down here.

No, I’m NOT a Grinch. I think Hanukwanzmas is the greatest thing for kids EVER. In fact, when I’m in charge of everything it will be against the law to tell anyone under 21 the truth about Santa Clause, Papa Noel, Father Christmas. At 21 a person can legally purchase alcohol to soothe the horrible loss of innocence the news will bring. Younger than 21 is just too cruel to contemplate.

When I got on the bus to return home yesterday an old man got on board with a small, pink, two-wheel bicycle for his grand daughter. I HOPE it was his grand daughter because if it was for his grandson there are going to be some real serious identity issues coming to the fore later in life. I looked at the bike with the usual jaundiced Gringo eye and saw what it was. A poorly-made piece of Chinese crap that will be lucky to make it through the first week before the plastic training wheels disintegrate. But that was my initial reaction. And then I realized the truth about what that bike really meant to him and what it will to the loved one he gives it to. In a country where the national minimum wage is a little less than $400 that bike took a huge chunk out of that man’s pocket. One could tell he didn’t have much to begin with just by looking at his clothes. But that little girl is going to feel like a princess when she unwraps it Christmas morning. Her FIRST bike and her “abuelo” gave it to her. He will be the brightest star in her firmament forever. It’s a crying shame that EVERY kid can’t feel like that this Sunday.

While I DO hate the piped-in Muzak version of Hanukwanzmas songs I’m NOT opposed to the following. It was turning dark when this group of kids from a local Methodist church came in to my yard. I know the vids are dark but when the sun sets here this close to the equator there’s no real twilight. It’s light, the sun sets and then it’s DARK! I used the night setting on the camera and a little clip-on light. As the kids come into the yard you will hear someone say, “Parada!” That’s the Spanish word for “Stop.” My hand appears when I waved back at the little girl with the Santa hat on the right.

Here’s wishing everyone a very Merry Hanukwanzmas and a fantastic new year.

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December 15, 2011 · 6:44 pm

Christmas Present to Myself

A couple of days ago my computer started acting weird again. First I got a message that my hard drive was maxed out. Couldn’t load anything more onto it which seemed strange since all my big items like videos, photos, that sort of thing are on a separate hard drive. I went to the control panel and deleted a bunch of stuff that I never or rarely used and gained just under 6 gigs of free space. Then a couple of days later when I’d put the cursor over something it would strobe like crazy and when I’d go to turn the computer off the little sign thingy would come up and disappear before I could click “turn off” so I’d end up hitting the on/off button until I could crash the thing and get it to shut off.

Yesterday I went down to the local PriceSmart (sort of a Costco big box store). They had a Sony Vaio there with a 500 gig hard drive and a lot more RAM than the old computer had and it had an English keyboard which meant the operating system would be in English. Panama, of course, is a Spanish-speaking country and the keyboards and operating system are Spanish-oriented. It’s easy to spot a Spanish keyboard. Just to the right of the “L” key on our English QWERTY keyboards, where the colon and semi-colon key is found, the Spanish keyboard has an “ñ” and the colon key is somewhere else though I never bother to look for it. The upper row of keys is our beloved QWERTY but there are some other subtle differences. I found those out when I used Spanish keyboards at some of the cyber cafes when I was first visiting Panama. Using them is a bit different from what we’re used to. For example, when you try and log into your email account as in “JustMe@yahoo.com” there is a convoluted, three-key sequence that requires you to hold your tongue in a certain way or the @ sign won’t appear. Then you have to find some kid sitting nearby working on their Facebook page to show you how to do it.

Well, this wonderful unit was available for $829 plus 7% sales tax. Would have set me back $887.03. Hmmm. Let me think about this for a little bit. But one rule of thumb for buying anything here in Panama is if you see it, buy it immediately because it probably won’t be around the next time you visit the store. Never the less, I decided to wait.

Back at home I was still having problems with the old computer. It is, after all, about six years old. The CD drive will still READ a disc but it’s been nearly two years since it would burn one. However I was thinking about that $887.03. The .03 was what was bothering me. So, in desperation I bit the bullet, made sure all the important stuff was on the external hard drive and I killed the old machine and took it back to the factory settings. It wasn’t the first time I did that on that machine. I had to do it six or seven months ago, too.

About thirty minutes after reading the message that said “Are you really sure you want to do this you ignorant butt-wipe, YOU?” the computer was back to the factory settings except for one thing…there was still, for some reason, only a little less than 6 gigs of free space on the hard drive. Of course, going back to the original settings wiped out all the bookmarks I had on the web sites I visit. That wasn’t an outrageously horrible problem since I’d been meaning to go through and delete probably 85 to 90 percent of them, anyway. You know how it is, you visit a site, enjoy it, bookmark it and never go back there after a week of so has gone by.

Then as I started the laborious process of visiting all the web sites I go to on a daily basis to bookmark them all over again I though, “this is stupid. Why not go get that Vaio at PriceSmart and put these into a NEW computer? Besides, it’s Christmas time. Why not give yourself a present?”

I needed to go to the bank, anyway, so I got up early this morning and went into David and to the HSBC branch at the Plaza Terronal. There are FOUR different stores there that sell computers so I thought I’d go check them out and see if they had any English-centric models before slogging back to PriceSmart which is actually on the bus route back to Boquerón. After visiting the bank for my monthly withdrawal I dropped into a place called Panafoto. They sell just about everything that has a cord attached to it from toasters to washing machines, stoves and refrigerators and, of course, computers. I stopped to look at the Vaios to see what they were priced at in comparison to the one I’d seen yesterday. They were all a little under the PriceSmart model but they were all Spanish-keyboard models. A sales person asked me if I needed any help and I said I was wondering if they had any laptops with English keyboards. (Keyboard in Spanish is “el teclado” which is easy enough to remember if you link it to the word “tickle” and doesn’t a piano player “tickle the ivories?”

“Yes,” he said, an HP.” Actually he said, “Si, una HP (achie pay) because he only spoke Spanish. He took me to the HP display and there was a Pavilion g6-1b70us notebook. Like the Vaio it has a 500 gig hard drive (five times the capacity of my old unit) and 8 gig of memory. A 15.6” screen and all for only $639.95, which, after sales tax, is $202.28 less than the Vaio. That’s one month’s rent and a month’s worth of electricity. One tends to think along those lines when living on a fixed income.

Naturally, when I got back home, I checked out what I could buy the same unit for in the States. Buy.com could get it to me for $578.99 which is $60.96 less but I have no idea how much shipping it would have cost so it probably would have cost more than what I paid for it here in Panama. At B&H Superstore it would cost $449.95 after a $50 mail-in rebate (and we know how well THOSE work out). That’s $234.80 less, but when you factor in the round trip from David to Panama City, two nights in a hotel plus air fair to and from Miami, I don’t think I’d save a thing.

For any reader who might be inclined to say, “yeah, but the Sony is a better computer than an HP, yada, yada, yada,” let me just say this is the FOURTH HP that I’ve bought; a desktop and two other notebooks. I drove all three of them into the ground after several years of hard use. I’ve had no complaints about the HP computers and I see no big reason to change.

Which brings me to a story I’ve told here, before, but it’s a good story so I’ll tell it again.

Back at the turn of the year 1974/75 I was working, and freezing my tender young ‘nads off, as a head-hunter in Chicago for a firm that specialized in recruiting and placing computer professionals. Heads of IT departments, systems analysts, that sort of thing. That was back when a computer was a behemoth that took up whole FLOORS of office buildings and were serviced by acolytes in lab coats working in conditions where you could store sides of beef. They were kept so cold because of the heat the machines generated.

One day I did a cold call to a guy who worked at Hewlett-Packard.

After getting his name, scholastic and work background covered I asked him, “So, what are you working on now?”

“Oh,” he said, “it’s real exciting. We’re working on a project for making mini-computers.”

“Mini computers? What the hell are those.”

“There going to be small computers that people will have right on their desks,” he enthused with the fervor of a true believer.

“Yeah, sure thing,” I said to myself. “A computer people will have on their desks.”

“Well, good luck with that,” I said as I cut the interview short without uttering the word “asshole” out loud. “Let me know how that works out for ya.”

As I said, this is my FOURTH mini computer.

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December 12, 2011 · 8:49 am

Weird Water In Panama

Water is weird here in Panama. Right now it’s coming out of the sky but not out of the faucet.

There are often times when there is no tap water. Don Ray, who writes the Chiriqui Chatter blog lives in the City of David (Panama’s third largest metropolis which is strange if you think of a place with only four stop lights as a metropolis) often writes that he has no water from his taps. Sometimes it’s for days at a time.

After the recent devastating river flooding that took out one of the bridges on the Interamerican highway there was no water here in Boquerón for several days though, fortunately I was still in Potrerillos Arriba then and never had a moment without water. Often after a heavy downpour water service is cut off because the turbidity in the rivers where IDAAN, the water company, draws its supply from, clogs the filters.

In Panama City, referred to simply as Panamá, where almost half of the entire country’s population reside they’re building a subway system and a couple of weeks ago it was necessary to shut off the city’s entire water supply for a whole weekend to reroute the water around the tunnel. Can you imagine what the outcry would be like in the States if everyone’s water was shut off for a couple of days in a city of a million and a half residents? Heads would roll.

But here people just shrug their shoulders and get on with their lives. If they were French they’d shrug their shoulders, make a “poof” sound through their lips and say “c’est la vie, hein?” (If you think English is a strange language because of its non-phonetic spelling, try French. Hein is pronounced “eh?” Go figure.) I don’t think there’s a Spanish phrase that expresses the same feeling as that one does.

Since water outages are a common, though thankfully not a daily, occurrence there is a good market for large plastic water tanks here. And I mean LARGE. In some cases several hundred gallon tanks. Most of them are black or bright blue and just sitting here I can think of at least four stores in an around David that stock the things along with pumps to feed the water into houses. We don’t have one of those here at this house though there has been talk of getting one. Instead I have three five-gallon pails that I keep filled with water for those times when there is no tap water. Most of the time I just keep them under the roof line and collect rain water in them. I don’t drink it, but use it for other things like flushing the toilet or washing dishes and clothes. I’ll be doing a post about laundry sometime soon.

For drinking water I have a five-gallon cooler thingy that I keep topped off with filtered water that I collect from the faucet when there is tap water, and I have a two-gallon jug of filtered water in the fridge.

When I was over visiting in Bocas del Toro I noticed that many of the houses not only had a big water tank but they had fitted out their roofs with large-diameter PVC pipes where rain gutters would normally be so they could collect and store rain water. Made a lot of sense to me.

Here in my neighborhood where the water supply through the tap is often just a trickle, for some unknown reason, most daytime hours there is one constant water supply. The river. Almost every day I’ll see people coming down the street with towels over their shoulders and a bag in one hand with soap, shampoo and razors and they go down to the river and bathe in the cool water. Quite often I see women bringing down their dirty clothes to do their laundry in the river. Nobody thinks anything of it. Nobody moans and groans about it as far as I know. It’s just how life is here. People cope and get along with living.

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December 3, 2011 · 3:08 pm

Pride of Chiriqui

Yesterday morning my next door neighbor, the one who has 30 (that’s right, count ‘em, THIRTY) fighting cocks, was out in his front yard letting some of his roosters have a sparring session.

There were three or four other men who were not from the neighborhood standing around watching. I ambled on over. I’ve had a bit of an interest in cockfighting since my paternal grandfather used to raise and fight the birds in and around Woburn, Mass. back at least into the early 1950s. It was, of course, highly illegal.

Anyway, I asked when he was going to fight them for real the next time and he said, “Tomorrow night at Las Brisas.” Las Brisas is a “Jardin (a combination bar and dance hall often with a cockfighting pit) in David, right on the bus route into the city. I said I’d really like to see him fight his birds but transportation was a problem since I don’t have a car. A young, solidly built young man in the crowd said, in English, “you really want to go?” I said I did and explained about my grandfather and his birds. “I’ll take you,” the young man said.

I stuck out my hand and introduced myself. “I’m Carlos,” he said. We talked for a little bit, me using a combination of English and Spanish since I honestly feel it’s impolite to speak to Panamanians in English and try my best to talk with them in Spanish. All of my neighbors only speak Spanish so I stretch myself all the time. But Carlos spoke to me only in English.

I asked where he learned his English. “In the States,” he said.

“Where in the States?”

“Philadelphia.”

“Really. What do you do there?” I asked.

“I play for the Phillies,” he said.

Now, I’m not a big baseball fan. Oh, I like it well enough but I don’t follow it and I think Ted Williams and Don Drysdale are the most recent players I could name. Back in the mid 70s when I spent two summers running a 300-passenger sightseeing boat in Chicago I lived just a few blocks from Wrigley Field and I’d go catch a couple of games. Not so much that I liked baseball, but it was a nice way to spend an afternoon. Those were the days before Wrigley put in lights so naturally all of the games were played during the day as God meant the game to be played, and it only cost $3 for a general-admission grandstand seat. I could sit in the shade and watch pretty girls walking around and people would bring beer, hotdogs and peanuts to my seat. Sometimes I’d even watch the action on the field.

So, being totally ignorant of who I was talking, to we watched the birds spar for a while and I wandered back to the house. “I’ll be here at seven tomorrow,” Carlos said, “if you want to go.”

“See you then,” I said.

Back home I went on line, checked out the Phillies roster and found out the young man’s name is Carlos Ruiz, and he’s quite a guy. He’s the team’s starting catcher.

(Photo from Wikipedia)

A champion, in fact since the Phillies won the World Series in 2008, and Carlos had a big hand in doing it.

In game three he hit his first post-season home run and then in the ninth he recorded a walk-off single, sending Eric Bruntlett home from third, becoming the fourth National League player to hit a bases-loaded walk-off hit in World Series history, the first to deliver a walk-off infield hit, and the first walk-off of any kind by a Phillies player in the World Series. ( A walk off is a hit that ends the game. It must be a hit that gives the home team the lead, and consequently, the win, in the bottom of the final inning of the game—either the ninth inning, or any extra inning, or any other regularly scheduled final inning. It is called a “walk-off” because both teams walk off the field immediately afterward, rather than finishing the inning.)

In 2007, Carlos had one of the highest fielding percentages in baseball among catchers with a .997, with only 2 errors in 744 chances. On June 26, 2007, Ruiz stole home on the front end of a double steal in an 11–4 home win over the Cincinnati Reds, becoming the first Phillie to steal home in 10 years and the first Phillies catcher to steal home in 25 years.

In 2010, he became the only player of Panamanian descent to catch a perfect game, and raised his season batting average to a career-best .302.

Ruiz caught Roy Halladay’s perfect game on May 29, 2010 against the Florida Marlins and Halladay’s no-hitter against the Reds in the first game of the National League Divisional Series on October 6, 2010. In so doing, he became the first man since the Chicago Cubs’ Randy Hundley in 1972, to catch two no-hitters during the same season and the first since Yogi Berra in 1951 to catch two no-hitters by the same pitcher during the same season On August 12, 2010, when the Phillies were down 9–2 going into the 8th inning, they scored 8 runs in the 8th inning. The following inning, the bottom of the 9th, the Phillies were tied and Ruiz hit a walk off double to win the game, 10–9.

In 2010, Carlos received the Pride of Philadelphia Award from the Philadelphia Sports Hall of Fame.

In 2011, he was rated the most underrated catcher in baseball by Jason Stark of ESPN. One scout in the MLB quoted, “I think he’s the best catcher in the game – other than [Joe] Mauer, who’s on a different planet.”

Born here in David, Chiricanos are rightfully proud of their native son as should all Panamanians. I’m honored to be riding to the cockfights with him this evening.

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December 2, 2011 · 8:17 am

I Felt THAT One!

Panama sits on the eastern edge of the “Ring of Fire.”

The “Ring of Fire” has 452 volcanoes and is home to over 75% of the world’s active and dormant volcanoes. Here in Chiriqui Province we sit in the shadow of Volcan Barú. One of the dormant ones. Shhhh. Don’t wake it up.

About 90% of the world’s earthquakes and 89% of the world’s largest earthquakes occur along the Ring of Fire.

I’ve lived most of my life (so far) in the hurricane magnets of Cape Cod, southeast Florida and New Orleans. One of the few good things about hurricanes, besides providing shovel-ready jobs for construction workers in the areas they hit, is that you know about them days and sometimes weeks before they nail ya so you have a chance to run away and hide somewhere if you have any sense.

Earthquakes, on the other hand, just HAPPEN! No rhyme, reason or warning. BAM!

Since I’ve been living in Panama we’ve had several small quakes and they’ve all gone unnoticed by me. Well, I thought I’d felt one once a few months ago in Potrerillos Arriba, but there was no mention of it anywhere in the media.

This morning, around 2 a.m. (EST) as visions of sugar plums danced in my head the world started to tremble and shake. Dishes rattled in the cupboard and knives forks and spoons jingled in their holder. There was no doubt that THIS is what an earthquake feels like. It didn’t last all that long and if there were any after shocks I didn’t feel them and fell back to sleep almost immediately.

This morning I learned that we had a 5.0 quake with an epicenter according to the United States Geological Survey some 23 miles west of David. That’s about directly under my bed. In 2009 there was a 6.2 quake in this same area that, while not causing any injuries did result in some structural damage to buildings.

The cash cow of the country, the Panama Canal and Panama City itself, the home to slightly more than half of the country’s population isn’t immune from the threat of earthquakes. In fact, there are two fault lines in the area, one that transects the Canal itself. Quite a bit has been written about this and the impending quakes that must inevitably come.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19745-panama-canal-is-due-a-big-earthquake.html

http://news.discovery.com/earth/panama-canal-quakes.html

(Anita Carter was Johnny Cash’s sister-in-law)

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Filed under Boqueron Panama, Living Abroad, Retirement Abroad

Tagged as adventure

November 28, 2011 · 6:00 am

Rolling On The River

You can always tell when it’s been raining up in the mountains by what’s happening in the little river beside the house. This morning it was, for this time of year, a mere trickle. In the middle of the afternoon you could hear the sound level rise and a glance out the kitchen window confirmed that the river had risen considerably though no rain had fallen here yet. By late afternoon we were getting a decent soaking and three teens came down with inner tubes.

“Why don’t you go up higher?” I said in my broken Spanish. “You’ll get a longer and faster ride. They agreed. It took them a while to make their way up stream a few hundred yards and then you could hear them yelling with delight.