metro-politan Panama City

I've written very little about Panama City since I moved here.  I think I've complained already about the Americanisation of the place - the elevated freeways, high-rise tower blocks, shopping malls and fast food joints - but it's not a bad place, just nowhere near as interesting as my previous home of Dakar.  It is fast-developing place, however.  Everyone knows about the on-going canal expansion, but above is the new metro, opened just a few months ago, and supposedly the first of four planned metro lines although the newly-elected president seems to have some different priorities so who knows whether the other three lines will get built.  It doesn't help my own journey to work but is clearly an enormous step forward for the city.

At the same time, we have the Metropolitan Park, some 230 hectares of dry tropical forest within the city boundaries.  It is part of a corridor of greenery across the country, set aside in part to protect the supply of water needed to operate the Panama Canal, but also providing a haven for wildlife and a nice recreational spot for the human population.  I was there last Sunday, arriving early to catch the birds before the people and heat drove them deeper into the bushes, and was lucky enough to see a pair of boat-billed herons roosting high in a tree.  These are nocturnal birds but one was awake and preening.


Not that many Panamanians go to this park however (a colleague expressed surprise when I showed him a photo of a howler monkey I took on Sunday, as he has never seen a monkey in his life and did not know there were any in the city), most preferring something rather more urban.  This, to me an unappealing bit of concrete, is where most of them prefer to go on a Sunday; you're not supposed to sit, or even walk, on the few strips of grass.

I do like some aspects of the Panamanian character, not least that they are very polite, being even better at queuing than the British and usually happy to stop their car to let a pedestrian cross the road.  But I don't understand their taste for all things concrete.  Nor, I have to say, their taste in clothes.  I went out for an evening with a colleague to a place she goes to regularly, with a live band playing Latin music (I still can't tell my salsa from my merengue...) and a crowd who are keen to dance.  There were more tight trousers and high heels, more leopard print fabric and more boob jobs than I ever want to see again in one place.  You might be thankful that I have no photos to illustrate that.