I am now an exchange student living with a real host family and everything! Wi-Fi does not work here in Gamboa, so my laptop has been demoted to photo storage and stuff like that. However, my wonderful host family has at least two laptops with internet so the only thing that will change is how easy it is for me to upload photographs; I will have to do some crazy transferring around between the 'tops. Also, laptop keyboards are a bit different here, as you might imagine, and I keep pressing buttons that I expect to be something different than what ends up on the page... it is taking me a while to write this...
I will upload pictures of the house and neighborhood and RAINFOREST that I am living in as soon as I am not lazy enough. Birds sing here all day, especially around four and five pm. Right now it is morning and I hear what must be ten different kinds of birds calling to each other. On a walk last night we saw some parrots (lorros) flying and squawking to each other. There are also ñekes or however you spell that all over the place; cat-sized rodents! They are adorable and my host family's dog Sarita loves to chase 'em. Sarita (Sara) is a black lab and so is Bimbo. Peter is a smaller brown and white spaniel of some sort. All friendly well-behaved dogs.
My favorite thing so far as far as animals, though, is the ants!!!! Ormigas, i think, in Spanish. The ants here CARRY THINGS and actually MAKE PATHS through the jungle.
Here, using the nice sidewalk is not really done, and the curb is for the ants. Seriously. Imagine seeing a thousand tiny pieces of leaves and flowers walking along the curb and then on closer inspection see the little red ants carrying 'em. It's crazy!
The house is a few blocks from the Panama Canal and the intersecting Chagres River, Chagres being an indigenous word for crocodile.
I'll come back with pictures later, I promise :)
5 comments:
Yay, congratulations!! I'm very happy to hear you like your new family!
You know that you can just plug your laptop into their internet cables, right? Your laptop has an ethernet jack... I don't think it has a modem jack though (for a real phone line) so if they don't have ethernet it won't work.
Sounds fantastic! I'm looking forward to pictures!
Wheeee! So glad you're comfortably ensconsed now. Been worrying... My regards to your new family. Any boats? :D
Hi, Learned about you blog from your neighbor Greg. We go to the same church and I shared with him that my husband and I are dreaming about moving to Boquete Panama in a few years. Have you been to that part of the country? Do you know anybody who has? How hard is it to communicate if you have very limited Spanish? Hope there are less bugs in Boquete than where you are. I also don't like to kill anything but I feel very happy to smack to death whatever is biting me or sucking my blood. How brave of you to take this journey to a foreign land while still in high school!
To Anonymous:
I'm nowhere near Boquete, and I haven't been there at all, but I know that it is beautiful there. :)
A lot of people speak English here, especially in cities where there is a lot of tourism. People are pretty forgiving if you don't know how to say something :)
As for bugs, there everywhere, although they really aren't too bad... the actual house that I live in has little to no mosquitoes, a manageable problem with teeny tiny ants, and the one-time deal with the garrapatas (ticks)... I don't think there's really any escaping the inherent tropical bugginess, but I've been able to deal with it, and I'm a wimp. :D
Yeah. Panama is really great, very beautiful, very nice people.
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