The Canal wasn’t the only thing handed back to the Panamanians. Somewhere around ten minutes from harsh downtown Panama City, beyond a number of shantytowns that surround the capital’s more presentable neighborhoods, you pass through a time warp. One second it’s twenty-cent empanada vendors on bikes, people drinking beer in the street, stray dogs and children and heaps trash. And then WHAM. You open the car door and step into 1950s Kansas.

I was roughly ten years old when my father brought me along to the local police precinct where we stood in line for a few minutes then went into a voting booth and closed the curtain behind us. Holding me in his arms, my dad simplified the options by calling one candidate good and the other candidate idiotic, then allowed me to hit the little red switch. I chose Bill Clinton, who had the same first name as our gym teacher. And while I'm not sure the legality of a ten-year-old boy voting in the United States, if confronted I'd resign behind the veil of democracy, a word that seems weighty and dismissive as if no one really has the right to question what went on back there. 

Unemployment is becoming a hot issue in Panama, where a large portion of the nation's work force has been occupied with the construction of its real estate boom, and is thus unpredictable regarding the future of a slouching investment market. About five years ago, Panama's unemployment rate was high, around 15%. At the end of 2008, it was marked at 5%, which is a huge improvement, fueled heavily by the real estate/construction boom. The majority of the nation's unskilled workers were put in harnesses and strapped atop construction sites: a handful of whom died because safety was not a priority.

"Don't look right now" my friend Liz whispered in my ear. "But Steven Seagal. He just walked into the restaurant. Oh, my gosh. I just saw his latest movie. He's so amazing. How's my hair look?" I would probably have been more tempted to look at a team of elderly women in bikinis. "Seagull?" I asked as I turned around, against her request. "How the heck did a seagull fly through that revolving door?"

There are a lot of Chinese immigrants in Panama and their hard work ethic manifests itself on nearly every corner of the country in the form of small grocery stores selling anything from sliced pineapple to salt-encrusted honey nuggets. These shops, or chinitos as they're called, top my list of guilty pleasures in Panama: shopping in them an experience that, like Jell-O wrestling, is about as gross as it is gratifying.

I was recently in a not-so-good part of town where I met a small boy selling bars of soap on a street corner and his fat fingers reminded me of baby carrots. The street corner was grimy: stray dogs infected with the mange roamed in and out of ramshackle buildings and off in the distance a man took, what can appropriately be described as a massive bowel movement in the street. The bars of soap which the boy was selling were handmade and they seemed to be laced with some sort of sand or abrasive, making for a terrifically exfoliating massage. It's unfortunate that Panama's sketchy neighborhoods can't be scrubbed using traditional cleaning supplies.

If you are up to date on your Panama current events, you know that we recently had a nation-wide vote to expand our Canal. But from the voter turn out (for an issue of such national pride and potential reward) it appears that most of Panama's population spent their Sunday instead searching for illegal booze. CNN probably captured a photo or two of Panamanians and their sisters lined up in ecstatic lines to cast their “Yes” vote, but what they missed were the millions of Panamanians, trying to fight the weekend's ‘no drinking' mandate, huddled in circles concocting moonshine in their bathtubs. “Who needs a Canal” they'd say “when you've got a fresh hootch of firewater brewing?”