Panama City - Blogabond

We left the Kuna people at around 8 o’clock in the morning and went to Panama City and back to the same hostel where we stayed before. We got an ok dorm room that we shared with a very special person but more about him later for now let’s just say that he was sleeping a lot.

After we got there we started out with just going around the neighborhood and having a look around and we ended up getting completely lost so when we stopped in a café to get a drink we meet a nice Swiss lady who told us how to get back and that made us realize we had been walking around and maybe even on the street where the hostel where.

That night we went out to get a nice dinner and also try out one of the casinos in the city. We went to a Italian restaurant and had a really, really nice dinner and after all that food we both got so tired so we didn’t feel like going out but on the way home we ended up still going into one of the casinos just to have a look around and we spent 4 whole dollars in the slot machines =)

The next day we slept for as long as we wanted and then we got up to go to a Huge shopping mall where we went walking around for almost the entire day and since I still have some pain in my foot this wasn’t the easiest thing in the world but still we found some things to buy. (Read: Steffi found some things to buy, including a super pink couch but I had to say no.) And it was cool to see the big American sized shopping mall and all the mannequins that had huge breasts and looked like playboy models. Or at least it was for the first hour or so after that I got a little grumpy.
In Panama City there is one thing that you cannot miss if you visit and that is the Panama Canal it is a huge canal that joins the Caribbean Sea with the Pacific Ocean thus saving a lot of ships the long trip around South America. The Canal was built in the beginning of the 20th century and at the 10th October 1913 the two oceans was joined together so the first ship was able to pass trough from one side to the other at 7th January 1914.

Since the canal has been there for so long the ships have grown a lot so now they build ships according to panamax size which means that they are built for the maximum size of the panama canal and they pass through the locks with only inches on each side, at the time we where there we saw one huge ship pass through and although it didn’t look like it had much room left it was still not the biggest size possible. This ship had to pay 90 000 dollars to pass through and that is still cheaper than going around South America. We also saw two “small” ships go through the locks with some tourists and they had to pay 1500 dollars each.
At the moment they are building new sets of locks so that when they are ready they will be able to accommodate ships with twice the cargo capacity these ships are now called Post panamax class and until the new locks are complete they have to take the long way around South America.

The same day in the evening it was Halloween night so me and Steffi went out to party and she got to try out her new shoes bought for 3 dollars. When we came home from the clubs at around 5 in the morning we went straight for the room but there the other guy who was sleeping a lot was not sleeping so much instead he was running around and when I met him he was asking the night watchman why we (me and Steffi) had been lying and said we were Swedish since he had heard everyone speaking Dutch (we had not).

A little while later we had gone to bed and he came back into the room and started flicking the light on and off we asked another guy that was standing next to him what was going on and he said that the guy had started looking for his girlfriend inside the walls and that he still just heard everyone speaking Dutch. The guy left the hostel early the same morning.

Next we are off to Cuba for two weeks.

Bye bye
Chris

written by

Steffi & Chris on November 5, 2009 from Panama, Panama

from the travel blog: 212 days

Send a Compliment

comment on this...