Moving to Panama - Dashed Hopes |
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| Written by Matt |
| Wednesday, 10 September 2008 09:14 |
 Junior year of college, my friend Ben Wiley arrived in Madrid after being taken hostage by his drunk frat brothers while studying abroad in France, stuffed in a car trunk around three in the morning, only to wake up in Spain's capital city disillusioned at lunchtime and smelling of cheap pot.
My jump to Panama was a little less ridiculous, but no less arbitrary.When asked how I initially came to Panama, I often strain to think of the moment it first entered my crosshairs as a viable place to live. While I know it wasn't an entirely random or haphazard choice, the actual dregs of the decision-making process, being so long ago, tend to more or less elude me. Before moving to a country, there's only so much research one can do on his own, before relying on the memories and experiences of others to fill in the creative void. I spent weeks paging through various guidebooks and websites, but there was always a certain intangible missing: a personal anecdotist factor that I needed desperately to draw Panama in a complete light. One of my earliest memories of Panama was at my parents home in Baltimore, Maryland, when I was confronted by Jewel: the leader of a crew that cleaned my parents house every other week: a middle-aged woman with a mullet and stubby, linebacker-like legs who had a way of making anything she said sound belligerent. "Now Panamar," Jewel spat. "I hear it's beautiful down there in them parts. But a friend of mine, her name's Louis, she gotta son who gone to Panamar a few years ago. Louis says he's cracked out on drugs all the time and writes home only when he wants more money. Now that's not what you're gonna do Matt, now is it?" Another memory comes to mind of an old family friend who swore he reported to Peace Corps duty in Panama somewhere back in the middle of the century, teaching English to kids in the jungle. Although Alzheimer's and a handful of other mental setbacks had begun to creep in, I remember taking his memoirs for what they were worth. "There was this great little bakery in the town of Boquete," he once recalled. "We used to ride our bikes there after school and eat empanadas. But we stopped going there when the owner, a little Panamanian woman, turned into a giant toucan. Can you believe that, a toucan? We had to battle her with samurai swords and small bottles of rubber cement to save all the little brioshes!" The Panama I met bore little resemblance to the jungled metropolis depicted in Hollywood thrillers or paperback novels or even the impression given by family members and cleaning ladies. It was a Panama not of penniless drug pushers nor one of bakery-owners-turned-toucans, and it made me upset, having envisioned such a paradise, to have such exotic dreams yanked out from under me. Take advice and suggestions with a grain of sal (that's Spanish for salt). I once met an investor who had been buying real estate in Nicaragua for nearly a decade. "Panama definitely exceeded my expectations," he told me over a beer in El Cangrejo. But as I prodded further, he revealed that this was mostly because "investment in Nicaragua was shitty." Theoretically, all Panama did for this guy was managed to be "less shitty": An endorsement he'll probably go on to tell everyone else. When arriving in Panama, in my opinion the best expectations are no expectations. Besides the number of crack heads that had me believing one thing or another about Panama, are the throngs of media outlets, which offer misleading information and tend to foster major let-downs among travelers and investors. Realistic expectations are better than dashed hopes. The happiest and most successful travelers and investors I run into came with very few expectations, and oppositely those who anticipate Candyland are often disappointed. Hilarious Photo Credit: www.move2th.com/Images/moving.jpg
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Comments (3)
  written by Rick Johnson , September 10, 2008 If you're interested in Nicaragua Real Estate, I would check out San Juan del Sur. It's great!
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| Last Updated on Wednesday, 10 September 2008 09:18 |
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