It is time for another blog…It has been so long so I am a bit out of practice.
We have spent the past five weeks learning, or attempting to learn, Spanish. What we have learnt is that each verb has about 60 different conjugations (or versions) – to say that I eat, you eat, he eats, we eat, and they eat, and the you need to put them into all the different tenses (I think there are 11 in total). We have been learning the present tense (e.g. I eat), the past preterite tense (I ate), the past imperfect tense (I was eating), and the simple future tense (I will eat). This should give us a grounding in speaking the language. But it is a bit more complicated than that. What we have learnt is that even if we technically know how to form the sentence, this cannot be done without actually knowing the words that you need to know. The first few weeks we would speak in Spanglish – for each word that we did not know in Spanish we would insert into the sentence in English. I must say that both of us rapidly improved over our five weeks. We can understand a lot, but our conversations are a bit too much focused on food, what we have eaten, what we are eating, what we are going to eat. All in all, if you are planning to try to learn a language – please try to learn loads of vocabulary, once you know the words you can learn the grammar. You will instantly be able to compile and speak sentences. We are practicing our Spanish every day, but we are also trying to build our vocabulary – bit by bit. Perhaps by the end of this trip we will be fully in the ‘intermediate’ sphere of the language.
For our lessons we stayed in two places, Bocas del Toro (Mouth of the Bull) – which is near Costa Rica – and Panama City – which is in the middle of the country. In Bocas del Toro we stayed in a homestay with a lady called Shelly. She was lovely, but grilled us at the dinner table about what we had learnt and done for the day (in Spanish). At first this was extremely hard as neither of us had enough words to reply to her, however, by the end of the four weeks we could hold a low level conversation with her. The house itself was basic, we think that she was relatively well off for the region as she had four bedrooms renting out (both to locals and foreigners). She also had a maid. So, the maid would clean our toilet, make our bed, and cook us breakfast and dinner on a daily basis. It was bliss. However, there was no hot water – for 4 weeks!!! The main issue with Bocas del Toro was the incredible heat, luckily this could be offset by the +27°C water surrounding the island. We implemented a system whereby we learnt how to dive and after that, we got our advanced water certificate – that way would could cool down in the ocean most afternoons. In total we completed 5 confined dives and 13 open water dives – we are able to dive down to a depth on 40m – about 12 floors of a building below the ocean. The lowest we have gone is 26.4m (about 8 floors). The diving grew on me, at first I was excited about it, then we went and I thought “so what”, but slowly we saw some pretty incredible things – on our first night dive we watched an octopus hunting on the ocean floor. It leapt on an anemone and surrounded it, a few seconds later a fish came shooting out – it was lucky. On one of our day dives we saw a nurse shark sleeping under the ferry wreck, we saw a lion fish, and cleaner shrimp (my favourite as they kind of dance and shake their tails to attract the fish to them – which they then clean and eat their spoils). We also saw spotted rays, a pregnant ray (where we got close enough to see the ‘stomach’ of the ray moving from the inside). We then saw a sea horse sleeping during the day and a huge nurse shark resting on the ocean floor. On our last dive we saw lobsters, crabs, and jelly fish (of which we could see the little blue and green electrical currents run up and down its body). So although diving is a lot of effort, it was a lot of fun and we saw an incredible amount of things on our dives.
In Panama City we did not have nearly as much time, we stayed with a lovely couple (she was from Panama and he was from California). We very much enjoyed their company and conversation. While in the city we visited Panama Viejo and Casco Viejo, the old town (ruins) and the old town (built in its likeness). We also wandered around the city, tested the coffee, beer, found some cider for Laurence, and generally just tried to take it all in. We even went on a ‘school trip’ to the Smithsonian and took a salsa lesson. All in all, we very much enjoyed Panama City, it is beautiful and interesting, however, there were a lot of things to be aware of. The streets had huge holes in them, I could easily have fallen fully into one and not be able to climb out (hence the very careful walking during the day and at night). There was rubbish everywhere – they city did not provide any rubbish bins and everyone just dropped the rubbish everywhere. It smelt – the amount of trash filled stagnant water was unbelievable, perhaps even more than Bocas del Toro. But not much of this was new, we had encountered this all through Central America and we have perfected the breathing without smelling, the walking without falling, and carrying our own rubbish bag around places.
We are very glad to have stopped in one place for so long, to have learnt from such wonderful and friendly people and to have had this opportunity. We will not forget Panama as we travel further though this region.