Panama City

The day starts today at 7 o'clock with breakfast at the hotel, in Germany everyone is already finished with lunch. The young woman in the dining room asks me something in Spanish, I have no idea, my Spanish is worse than my English, later she shows me a fried egg, aha I understand, nod to her and say ci. For breakfast there is coffee, tastes quite normal, and orange juice, freshly squeezed and very tasty. In addition, there is toast to toast yourself and a sandwich maker. There is no sausage, only jam and cornflakes, as well as a fruit that I don't know, a mixture of watermelon and honeydew melon.

The plan for the day is made, buy water and a prepaid card, and then we go to the old town. So we start off to the supermarket, we are amazed, the prices are decent, a yogurt over 2 dollars, sausage and cheese about 4 dollars. For that, I get a good Gillette razor for $4.50. So we buy a 6-pack of water and continue to a mobile phone shop called Movistar (Why is it called Movistar and what does it have to do with movies?). I ask the nice woman if she speaks English, but she shakes her head, oh dear, this will be difficult now, but with hands and feet we finally manage to get a prepaid card + credit for $7.5.

Let's go to the old town with architecture from the colonial period of the Spanish in the 17th century. A pirate is said to have plundered Panama with 1800 pirates back then. It all looks really good, the skyline of Panama, the promenade on the Pacific and then the old buildings and churches that are lovingly restored bit by bit, construction is happening on every corner here, worse than in Berlin. We continue north from the old town to a neighborhood that looks really run down, garbage is everywhere and the houses look like after the war, there is lively activity here, many people bustling around. A man, slightly smaller than me with a sunken face, crosses our path, looks at us and says something we don't understand, we keep walking and he keeps talking and looking at us. A short time later, a woman crosses our path, she also says something to us, very insistently, and points her finger in the direction we came from... then it dawns on me, we shouldn't continue in that direction and better turn back, so we better make our way back. Some areas should be avoided, but here you can see again how big the gap between rich and poor is, the banking district with its magnificent skyscrapers and the promenade, which looks so well-maintained and in contrast, this run-down neighborhood.

Oh yeah, the water that we got in the supermarket in the morning turned out to be distilled water without minerals. Not so good at these temperatures when you have water that you can't drink. 😰😂