no me gusta hormigas en mi cama, gracias.

Hi, guys. I'm still alive, even though ants moved into my bed last night and I had to fight them off for almost an hour before I could go to sleep. I don't know what they were after, but several hundred met their doom. For a kid who used to start fights with kids who stepped on ants, I killed a lot of ants last night. They're the teeny tiny biting kind, and, what can I say, they were not welcome in my bed.
I just waited an hour for one single photograph to upload onto here to show you guys, but it hasn't gotten anywhere, so I'm afraid you will have to imagine a large green leaf being cut up by long-legged red leafcutter ants on the sidewalk when I went on a walk earlier today. Sigh.

apparently the coast is hot

It is so hot today. I just woke up about half an hour ago on the top bunk in a room in my host family's beach house we drove to yesterday. The ceiling fan above me looked a little like it was going to fly off its base it was moving so fast, and another fan was roaring on the floor, but I am still so hot... soooooo hot. I don't knowo what the temperature is, it is just "really freaking hot".

I lament my lack of bloggage the last several days. I just haven't had access to the computer... my host family uses it a lot, and it seems like every time I've gotten a hold of it recently, someone has asked to use it before my email has even gotten a chance to load.

Soooo yeah. I had more to say, but since it is so hot, my brain is sort of melting and I don't remember what all I was going to talk about except for tortillas, which I love. Here, tortillas fit in the palm of your hand and are about a quarter to half an inch thick. They come frozen, uncooked, in packages and when they are cooked they are delightfully crunchy on the outside and soft on the inside... and delicious.

Also, people here put mayonnaise on EVERYTHING. I tend to decline...

I saw toucans!

mwahahaha. toucans. I saw them having a squawk-off in the trees down the street. They're the small kind... I don't know the actual name. But they were pretty cute. Tamila and I were watching her brother and his friend play soccer.
Earlier today Tamila and I took the bus into town to the Albrook Mall, the largest mall in Latin America or something like that. We shopped, then watched that new movie with Adam Sandler about bedtime stories, but dubbed in Spanish so I really only got the gist of the movie, and then we shopped some more. I am so hungry right now. They eat dinner late here.
I think I can feel my Spanish improving, a few words or phrases a day. Of course, I've only been here, like, three days, so my host sister still gives me funny looks when I try to say anything more than three words long.
I didn't take any pictures today, but if you haven't already you should go see what I uploaded to Flickr yesterday: http://www.flickr.com/photos/littlesister4/

I am officially "here"!

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 :)

I AM IN PANAMA OMG

Here I am!
Heck yes.
So this morning me and the two other girls heading to Panama said goodbye to the other AFS USA kids and got ready to board our plane. We sat around for a long time, constantly worrying we'd missed some important information, and located another AFS kid, Gisli. Gisli is from Iceland and he, too, was on his way to Panama and we talked with him for a long time. He's very tall, very blond, very blue-eyed.
The plane ride was long (well, like two and a half hours) and hot and uncomfortable, as usual.
Then we arrived.
Immigracion is SUPER confusing when you don't speak that much espanol and the lady at the desk is trying to break down the words for you and you're like "umm... estudiante... seis ... months... um... hablo solo un poquito de espanol! Gracias!" but I made it... Apparently we all have to go back there on Monday to get our actual Visas to stay here. After Monday we'll get to go to our host families and start the real deal, I guess.

We're staying in an old house with new facilities, in some other girls' room. There is a large television in our room that we are currently watching "SuperNanny" on... in English. Hellz yeah.

So far, Panama is beautiful. I love it, in all its humidity. I think it smells like PopRocks, but the other two girls just give me funny looks when I say that. I dunno.

We saw some crazy critter when we went for a quick walk up the street:
We think that it might be a paca (conejo pintado), but we don't really know.

So: I am alive, I'm in Panama, it's hot, it's amazing, it smells like Poprocks.

peace, mates. :)

More pictures up on: http://www.flickr.com/photos/littlesister4/

Here I Am In Florida

Apparently it is freezing and raining back home, but home is thousands of miles away right now, and here in Miami it is 80 degrees and humid. Mom and I arrived yesterday morning and went to the Miami Metrozoo.

We wandered around the zoo until our sleep-deprived bodies couldn't take it anymore.
Today we drove to the Keys and experienced the joy of seeing tiny brown lizards running around everywhere. We ate lunch at a restaurant called Snappers, at the request of my aunt.

I don't know how often I'll be online once I actually get to Panama, but I promise I'll keep you few brave souls who read this updated.

Get Set...

River blindness! Typhoid! Dengue! Botflies! Oh my!

Oh crap.

Going to Panama means going to a tropical country with lots of crazy exotic parasites and stuff.
This morning I woke up an hour early so I could swallow the last of my four typhoid oral vaccine pills. I have yet to get the hang of swallowing pills; dude, I buy chewable multivitamins. They taste terrible like sweet powdery sour apples (I guess "berry" was the flavor they were going for), but better than the taste you get when you try to chew pills most people just swallow; damn, vitamin C is sour!

Anyway, my dad took me to the county health department a week or two ago and the nice but geographically-challenged RN gave me a shot in each arm; the left got yellow fever and the right got Hep A, which apparently I had missed out on last time I got shots. I was up-to-date on tetanus and stuff, so... yay.

Of course, malaria is big in the rural areas of Panama, and though my host family lives in Panama City (or Gamboa... which is near Panama City... but then again, everything in Panama is near Panama City) but there is currently no vaccine for malaria. If I head off to rural Panama for, say, a camping trip, I have to (gasp) take "anti-malarial" pills a few days in advance and every few days for several weeks. Great.

Anyway, I also got info on my host family! Two parents and an 18-year-old daughter. I wrote them a letter (I didn't get their email address) and I hope it gets there safely... if not, well, they won't know how bad my Spanish is until I get there in... 24 days!