At the age of 28, I gave in and finally decided to get a massage. I tell people this and they think, I guess, that I’ve been living in a cave for the past quarter century. The kind of place where you scribble your feelings on walls and the only food available for consumption is an oversized turkey leg.

“Someone died in there yesterday.” It’s not what you want to hear when entering a parking garage in Panama. Hell, it’s not what you want to hear anywhere. To make matters worse, the security man who said it hadn’t qualified the comment with any useful suffix. “Someone died in there…from old age,” he might have said or, “someone died in there…when they accidentally tried to swallow a rock.” No, there was no telling why the death occurred.

I was trying to cross five lanes of bumper-to-bumper traffic on Via Espana over the combined distance of about twenty feet. This may sound like an audacious attempt, but in Panama it's fair game and most drivers will concede to your effort and let you through. This is not to say everyone is so kind however. I was only one lane away from completing my mission when a man in a rusted Windstar lurched forward effectively blocking my last remaining angle, inching so close to the car ahead of him that, even on a bicycle, I would not have been able to squeeze through.

There are few things in Panama that hold their low cost amidst a country of otherwise astronomical inflation: $2 taxi rides, for example, twenty cent snow cones, a bottle of Coke, and, as I would find out recently, custom made suits at a little place called La Fortuna. There are also few things as deliciously empowering as being measured by a team for custom clothing. So by my calculations, a visit to this place is pretty much a no-brainer.

My first yoga class in Panama was not unlike my first Chinese lesson in middle school in that they both consisted of an instructor speaking a language I didn't understand. "Now I need you to stand on the edge of your mat, tuck your toes inside your foot and separate your hipbone," Rachel Divine said. "Come on, separate that hipbone. Make it really stretch." I tried for the life of me to separate my hipbone, but it was no use.

I took up swimming somewhere back in college when the equilibrium of heavy partying and physical fitness was thrown off severely by my discovery of an invention called the beer bong. I had always maintained decent shape playing a variety of sports as a child, but there seems a point when the vices of adulthood catch up with the adolescent metabolism, when things like liquor, cigars and sedentary lifestyles seem much more fun than activities in the park.

My friend Ryan was about six when he met then President Bill Clinton jogging one morning in Marta's Vineyard. The President's personal security team had sequestered Ryan's parents off to the side, given him a brief pat down, and allowed him to shake Clinton's hand, the same hand that would later feel up Monica Lewinsky.

It was on the toilet paging through an old copy of Men's Journal when I came across an interview with celebrity Jeff Bridges and the question, Where's the weirdest place you've ever woken up? While it's difficult for written text to convey the pulse of silence, I imagined Bridges toiling with the locks of his beard and looking into the sky before revealing his answer. "A sensory deprivation tank," he said. "Invented by a friend John Lilly in the early 70s."

Somewhere back in middle school, I was forced against my will to attend an adventure camp in the hills of Blairstown, New Jersey which was intended to increase self-confidence in youngsters through the magic of mother nature, scary rope courses and bad trail mix.

The Gorgona Co-Operative was founded on December 15, 1997 by Mr. Dagoberto Torrero Gaona, a native to Cocle Province. Gaona belonged to the Farallón Fishing Cooperative, near Decameron. “Working as a fisherman in Farrallón, I had occasion to visit with the Gorgona fishermen. I realized their work life was difficult and the prices they were receiving for their catches were very low. So I decided to help them.”

Thanks to an undiagnosed case of attention deficit disorder, I was never able to sit through movies unless they offered a bathroom break somewhere in the middle. On the rare occasion that I'd be dragged in to see a film, I preferred to use the time-barring an exceptional screenplay-to nap in chairs that were at least more comfortable than the ones at school.

There tend to be two kinds of gringos in Panama today I have noticed. The first kind makes a valiant stab at learning the national language (however lame it may be). And the other kind whose idea of Spanish is fairly simple in that it merely involves adding the letter ‘O' to the end of every English word.

As a young American living in Panama, much of my business and pleasure is done in the presence of people significantly older and more astute than myself. There are times at dinner parties or office meetings, when conversations inevitably take a turn for the serious and in an effort to thwart this gravity, this weightiness of my social existence in Panama, I recently decided to opt for a bit of a younger crowd.

Don't wear sandals when you go to the fish market in Panama City. That's a lesson I learned the hard way as upon leaving the establishment, my toes encased in fish scales and seafood entrails. The sort of thing that you usually associate with smelly and suntanned boatmen named things like Skippy or Ron Jon.

Over the course of three months, I explored Central America's hottest travel destination, staying at the finest hotels, eating at the most exclusive restaurants, and taking the most exciting tours: none of which I ever paid for. I slept in beds overlooking the sea, I ate six course meals designed for princes, and I caught prize-winning marlin aboard a luxury yacht, all without paying a dime.

For my eighteenth birthday, I bought myself a crossword puzzle book created by Will Shortz, a clever mastermind behind some of the world’s most difficult puzzles. I had hinted to several friends that this was definitely something worth buying, but when no one took the bait, I splurged and ended up spending nine dollars of my own money.

Three dollars. It can’t even get you a beer in a New York City bar. But it’s the going rate for a haircut in Panama City. Peppered all over the El Cangrejo neighborhood, the barbershops, too many for the available number of scalps, all advertise the same rate. Then again, I never saw a Panama City dweller with a hair out of place.

Riding a Chivas Parrandera in Panama City has all the safety of lunch with a blind contract killer. “Um, excuse me” the hit man would say, running his hands over my face. “Are you about five foot eight, one hundred and fifty pounds?”

Walking out of my apartment the other day I saw one of the regular hobos who sift through the dead motherboards and soiled linens and dried out fish heads that most people call trash. To the public, these things are past their prime and are not worth the space they take up anymore. To this hobo though, the stuff is cool. I was sort of envious of the man, as he fished around in a garbage bag–one which I recognized as my own—as he pulled out one thing after another. Broken alarm clock, used up razor blades, batman blow-up doll with air leakage problem. He didn't look at the things as garbage though. No, he looked at them with optimism. He looked at them the same way a football coach might look at the scrub of the team, as if to say, I could make something out of you.

I met a guy the other day in an elevator who introduced himself as soon as he caught eye of the English written on my t-shirt. He wore a dirty John Deer tank top and a Corona hat with mesh on the back. “Clete's the name,” he said to me with a giant smile that revealed a severe shortage in teeth.