Bud

I concur.

My interpretation of the poorly written article is that Panama is trying to “grow up”. It is having to deal with the impact that the digital world is having on society in general. Witness AirBnB and Uber. Panama, like other countries, is trying to promote tourism, but it is having to deal with ancillary issues such as the impact of Uber on the taxi union, and AirBnB and tax revenues versus the hotel industry, the taxi union, etc. They are learning, albeit slowly. I just wish the print media were better able to highlight the real story and describe it to the readership.

News Room Panama is not good about critically proofing their articles, imo.

Based on a resource recommendation by Brandy Gregory, we visited a store in David last Friday to see if they had bulk boric acid powder (polvo de ácido bórico in Spanish). The name of the store is Productos Quimicos Ibis SA. And yes, they did have it. The staff was very helpful. All conversation was in Spanish.

Thanks mucho, Brandy. We were able to avoid an Internet purchase based on your information.

Here is the location of that store on Google Maps: https://goo.gl/maps/8fuzs41aPpT2

Here are some pictures taken during our short visit to the store. In the first picture you can see their telephone number.

Absolutely disgusting! Instead of once a day protracted outage, we now seem to be averaging two such occurrences on a daily basis. And no, not counting the short duration outages of less than a minute or two. We typically lose electricity for several hours at a time.

Trying to be positive here, at least this outage is a total outage rather than the really hard ones from an appliance perspective of losing only one phase, or wildly fluctuating voltages.

On 2/17/2018 at 4:52 PM, TwoSailors said:

We are in the same mindset. 

A bit more on this subject of jubilado discounts. Our logic is that the restaurateurs are in business to make money by providing a good meal. It is a tough market, so we are told, and we just can't believe that any place can survive at sub-$10.00 pricing being further discounted.

Going further, if a meal is between $10.00 and $20.00 we discuss on a case-by-case basis. If it was great food, great service, and lots of food (in other words the restaurant really delivers a good dining experience), then we generally will not ask about the jubilado discount.

Above $20.00, then we discuss, but generally the outcome is to ask for the jubilado discount.

Tipping is a different but related matter, and almost always involves a discussion between the two of us. Each dining experience is tipped according to the total dining experience.

This is our M.O. Your mileage probably varies.

Thanks to Two Sailors (and others) for posting about this eatery. Marcelyn and I were in David yesterday for business, and stopped by Unplugged GstroPub for our admittedly late lunch prior to returning to Boquete.

This was our first visit at Unplugged. Actually we were going to challenge Penny's assessment to the effect that they have very good hamburgers. But she was right. We have no idea where they get their beef, but it was very tasty and prepared to our liking. I ordered the patacones that Penny mentioned above, and Marcelyn ordered the green salad. Everything was tasty. The lemonade was good. I have never seen or tasted patacones prepared the way they do it, but we both liked them and thought that patacones will be our first choice for the appetizer when we next visit Unplugged, and visit again we will.

As Penny mentioned, the entire luncheon was $7.00 per person. Other than the background music being louder than we prefer, there was nothing to fault at Unplugged. Good food, good service, great prices, etc. (BTW, when a meal is under $10 we do not inquire about a jubilado discount, so don't ask us about that.)

We were a bit concerned in that we were the only patrons, but then again we did not arrive until about 2:15PM. We hope they survive because we do plan to visit them again (and again...).

14 hours ago, Uncle Doug said:

I  don't see how this is anything more than a fantasy. California has been unable to make any significant progress on their high speed rail connecting the huge populations of San Francisco and Los Angeles. 

How on earth would it make any  economic sense to build one to a city of 150,000?

I agree with you that this just doesn't seem to be able to pass a typical short-term ROI test. However, I lived in Hong Kong for three years while on assignment, and also spent a lot of time inside China during those three years. I learned that the Chinese are long-term thinkers and planners, rather than short-term ROI people to the same degree as the USA. By "long-term" I refer not to 5 or 10 years, but maybe several decades into the future.

It will be interesting to see if this project comes to fruition, and if so, what the real intentions/goals of such a large investment by China may be. My current think is:

• increased trade in Central and South America,
• sources of food and natural resources for the Chinese,
• outlets for Chinese products (and services?) of all kinds, and
• increasing influence in the Americas.

Wow. I’m beginning to think this train thing may actually happen, but if so would it be in my lifetime?

I like trains. The longest trip I’ve ever done by train was 3.5 days all the way across Australia — Perth to Sydney. What a pleasure it was.

17 minutes ago, Jim Bondoux said:

I'm guessing that a "technical stop" will work better for the link, if that means that no visas will be required of passengers. Visas are required for all transit passengers in the US, even if they are just making a rapid connection. The time, cost, and uncertainty of US visas for citizens of the PRC and for citizens of Panama who are not going to visit the US would certainly impair the market opportunity for those flights.

Good points. Thanks for posting.

10 hours ago, Keith Woolford said:

The driver of this one says he was hit by a horse ?.

I'll bet the horse did not have on its lights and did not use its blinking turn signals, and so this is entirely logical.

This has to be true because no one could make this stuff up.

Sorry, I just have to be cynical about these reports. Was the horse seriously hurt? Hopefully not as much as the vehicle and the driver's ego.

6 hours ago, Keith Woolford said:

“technical stopover”

I have heard that term used only one other time. It meant a refueling stop, and no planing or deplaning back then. Is that the inference here?

Curious if today’s outage (still ongoing) is because of another wildfire, or some other excuse. Emergency generators are not designed to run so much. We just seem to have routine, daily “emergencies” when it comes to the power grid. 

1 hour ago, MarieElaine said:

I swear by boric acid as well.  You can buy the food grade by the bag full at the Finca Marta table at the Tuesday Market.  Just sprinkle a line around your house/garden/patio and the ants are gone in an hour or so.

Given that we have 42 quintrillion 14 billion 237,017 ants (I counted every blasted one of them! ) surrounding our home in barricade fashion, we plan on trying your approach to keeping them critters under control.

Thanks for sharing this secret, and we really hope it works.

On 2/8/2018 at 8:37 PM, Keith Woolford said:

There were plenty of Tránsito Police and several Transit Authority inspection checkpoints on the highway coming from Panama today. They are ramping up for the Carnaval long weekend. 

The word is that the Caldera checkpoint has been very hard on drinking drivers returning from David late at night and during the early hours of the morning lately. Lots of towing.

Background:

When Marcelyn and I travel to PC by auto, we make a game of counting the number of police checkpoints for checking for the speeding (and other unsafe) drivers. Up until late 2017, we typically would see four to as many as about eight checkpoints. That number reflects the number of checkpoints, NOT the number of police, as some checkpoints may have two or three police at the ready. Then in December 2017 we broke a record with 27 checkpoints.

Current Story:

We returned from PC late yesterday (Friday, February 9^th), and broke the previous record by more than double. We counted 56 (!) checkpoints. They were on both sides of the roadway, and the impression we got was that they were wanting their abundant presence known to all. As Keith posted, this obviously is to help minimize the carnage during the Carnavales period that is beginning now.

We were stopped twice yesterday to check us out in more detail. One of those checkpoints -- at the inspection stop at Guaybalá -- was a bit frustrating because it involved about a 35 minute stop. They had about a 2 KM backup on the westbound roadway (that included us). We presumed that they had some kind of incident going on, because for about 20 of those 35 minutes no one was moving. And then the queue slowly began moving.

When we were positioned third in the queue, the police did ask the driver and occupants of the vehicle then undergoing review to exit their vehicle and then they opened all the doors and were extremely thorough looking in, around, and under that vehicle. Eventually the occupants returned to their vehicle and departed without incident.

As we started our turn at the gauntlet, we encountered both police as well as immigration officials. The police asked for driver license and were looking intently inside of our vehicle. We were not asked for insurance or other documentation (e.g., registration, etc.) by the police officer. Then the immigration officer swapped positions with the police officer and the first words spoken were to present our passports. (We obviously look like gringos, natch.) Instead we both presented our cedulas, and everything was in order.

Both the police officer and the immigration officer were professional and polite -- but very meticulous and thorough. The driver license and the cedula were carefully read, not just glanced at.

Our second encounter with more than just a wave and "adelante" was on the Gualaca/Caldera bypass (we don't go through David). Their location was just a few kilometers from the commercial truck weigh station. This again was a full stop, but fortunately the queue was considerably shorter. Driver license was requested, and it was scanned by a smartphone, and then apparently a database was being queried. There were two policemen in the roadway center, plus two police vehicles, one on either side of the road, with another police officer standing by each. They were stopping both directions and thoroughly checking a database. No one was being waved on through without having been checked.

Not complaining here. In fact, we are kinda pleased to see that public safety resources are making their presence well known. The only bad side of our experiences yesterday was to lose about 45 minutes to waiting, thus delaying our arrival at our home.

Can someone tell me what the fine is for driving on a toll road without Panapass installed? Or is that not even possible?

We got our confirmation email back from the County Registrar as of this morning. Quick service. Less than 24 hours from time of submission.

Again, if you wish to vote in November 2018, you need to get your absentee registration/ballot forms submitted soon.

Keith Woolford is the "go to" guy for these kinds of matters. He is a regular participant on CL, so you probably won't have to wait long for a reply. Others are certainly free to respond as well. I'm just trying to give you some hope at this moment.

We have used CableOnda for our television access for many years, and have been fairly happy with the service. Recently one TV channel (61) displays the video, but there is no audio. Not wanting to believe that there are nefarious forces at play to deny us access to Fox News, we prefer to believe that there is a system failure.

In chatting with CableOnda customer service this morning, it turns out that they are are able to remotely diagnose the components in our home, and they discovered that our cable box is failing. A service call has now been scheduled. The representative was very professional, spoke totally in English, and covered every base.

Impressive customer service. We now hope that the service call will fix the problem, but no reason to believe otherwise.

Reason for posting here is to “bump” this topic back to the top in the activity stream here on CL.

We completed our FVAP registration process this weekend. Took about 10 minutes.

If you wish to vote this year in US federal elections in November, be advised that there are some registration deadlines that may soon close. Those deadlines vary by state.

We had FIVE power outages yesterday (Thursday, February 1^st), with the longest being about three hours.

These outages are really hard on appliances, and Thursdays are our laundry day. Not much laundry got done yesterday.

Ask me if I am a happy camper.

1 hour ago, Moderator_02 said:

...has presented his irrevocable resignation as president of Panama’s Supreme Court.  

Do any of you pick up the terminology here — “...irrevocable resignation...”? Without specifying such, could José Ayú Prado change his mind and go back into that position?

More information coming forward on this current power outage. We are now told that it was not a transformer that exploded, but rather a tree limb that shorted out the power lines into our area. The current projection is another two hours for repairs.

How does one know who or what to believe anymore? 

I was not aware that Panama has a governmental transparency agency. Now that I am aware of such, I am very curious as to how Odebrecht happened? How did Blue Apple happen? Etc., etc.

Or did this agency come to fruition after those corruption issues, and perhaps as a result of them?

If your experience is like mine has been, you will find MBE Boquete to be very responsive (and friendly as well). Velkys, Arturo and the others are very accommodating. I am one of their original clients, having been in Boquete now starting year 17.

In all of those years I have never had reason to communicate directly with their facility in the Miami area. Customer interface is here in Boquete either across the counter or via email, and the courier/delivery interface is in Miami. You would be a client, not a courier/carrier.

I recommend that you communicate only with the Boquete office. Sometimes they do get busy, but give them a day or so, and they will get back with you. You can call if you like, [+507] 720-2684, and I presume you already have their email.

In my book MBE Boquete gets 6 stars on a 5-star rating scale.

We are again enjoying some early morning rainbows. 'Tis that time of the year. Unfortunately no pictures right now as my camera is broken. Just look ourside early in the mornings, or late afternoons and you may be greeted with a pleasant reminder of Mother Nature at work.

For newcomers: CEFATI is a good place to see rainbows in the late afternoon hours, typically starting about 4:30PM for an hour or so.