Landing in a new place is always exhilarating. And tiring. There's a lot to do; everything is new to you, so your brain gets I/O bound. This past week I've spent mostly visiting banks, talking to people, and of course making sure the food is good in the restaurants.

Many places have free WiFi connections available. This is in sharp contrast with Costa Rica, where the Internet is a state-run monopoly. Not much public WiFi in Costa Rica. We went to a Lebanese restaurant named Habibi ("darling" in Arabic) which offered free connectivity if you brought your laptop. They also had WiFi cards and laptops with WiFi cards for rent, at two Balboas and 5 Balboas per hour respectively. (Remember, Balboas are US dollars using an alias.) Another thing you can rent at Habibi is a hubbly-bubbly. We sat in the front room next to the hubbly-bubbly storage shelves. There were about thirty unique pipes, most of which were a little less than a meter in height. About eight of them were rented by customers during the evening, and the waiter was kept very busy carefully doing the ritual of preparing them. It costs five Balboas to rent one with a load of tobacco, which smells vaguely like fruit but not the same as regular pipe tobacco. The waiter told me that one fill would last over an hour. I declined the hubbly-bubbly experience, and didn't have a laptop, so had to content myself with eating.

There are a lot of apartments in Panama, and it's a renter's market. We ended up with a 200 square meter (2,000 square feet) three bedroom apartment on the "14th" (really the 13th) floor in the Marbella district. It's only $1,100 per month including charges, and has a swimming pool, gym, and sauna on the 3rd floor. The building also has a backup generator in case the power goes out, which I haven't seen yet. I'm not going to have to buy a car, because everything's within walking distance; and if something is farther away, taxis are cheap (typically about $1-$2). Anyway, my horn-honking skills aren't up to Panamanian standards.

According to one person I had lunch with here, there are two reasons why there are so many apartments available in Panama. The first is that Panamanians move in groups to the chicest area of town over a period of time. Since I'm a hitchhiker, I don't care about that very much, so I live in an area that used to be chic. The other reason is that building apartments is one of the best ways Colombian, US, and Panamanian drug dealers and politicians have at their disposal to launder large amounts of money. Once money
is turned into a building, it's magically Ok. After a building has been built, it usually sits there for a year or more with no occupants, and the owners don't really care. Anyway, there's no tax on new construction for twenty years "to encourage construction", so that's another reason it doesn't matter to them.

I have been very fortunate in my dealings with banks to have met with relatively higher-up people through serendipitous personal introductions. I don't know anyone here, but have already managed to make some friends. I've heard that it's not a pleasant experience to walk into the lobby and take a number in most banks. You have to have or make personal connections in Latin America, and business is not done with cold calls. I'm not going to mention any names or banks, but there have been surprises. It's relatively hard to open an account here. You have to have several banking references and authenticated documents. One bank we visited was interesting in that the minimum account balance was 100,000 Balboas. Oops, they forgot to mention that when we set up the appointment. It's probably needless to say that this hitchhiker is looking for the minimum account balance of more like 100 Balboas. So far, the lowest number has been 300 Balboas, which I guess we'll have to live with.

My work has been hectic, trying to catch up. The Internet connection has been good with some notable exceptions; I've had to learn a lot more than I really thought I needed to about how DNS works, and there have been some irritating outages when nothing works very fast. Fortunately these periods don't seem to last more than 15 minutes at a time, and all seem to be DNS or router related. I did stop into the local office of Cable & Wireless, one of the many Internet providers. They offer ADSL lines with an Ethernet switch for montly rents of 45 Balboas (128K) up to 155 Balboas (1,024K). A connection to a single computer running a legacy operating system talking through a USB port is about ten Balboas cheaper per month. No, thanks. I still have to check with Cable Onda to see how much the cable connections are.