| Car Accidents in Panama |
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| Written by Matt Landau | ||
| Saturday, October 13 2007 | ||
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It was coincidentally the morning of my 25th birthday
in Panama
that the hands of father time appeared to be officially against me and the
inevitable happened. After an exceptional number of years without a car accident,
I finally broke the streak. I was driving in what equates to Panama's version of "the hood" where lots of people sit out on their stoops smoking cigarettes and angrily waving half-drunken beer bottles. The curbs are littered with garbage, the shops sell stuff that you might mistake for scrap, and most of the open windows sport bed sheets instead of shutters. It is in areas like these that stopping for a cold soda or even stopping at a stop sign is not exactly the first thing that they mention in promotional advertisements. So after many years of driving (quite skillfully I might add) through some of the more congested and aggressive arenas of the world, it was here on the cheerful morning of my 25th birthday that I was slammed from behind (not my fault) by a small car that could have passed as a matchbox on wheels. It was the kind of petite vehicle that might be described on European TV as trendy and simple: its model name perhaps something sporty like a 2-door Speck. So when it collided into my rear bumper, it was not unlike a fat person sitting on a push pin in that I barely felt a thing. When I realized what had happened, my birthday morning high died like a set of malnourished parakeets. Because the rule in Panama is that you may not move your car from the spot of the collision (for police/insurance purposes), I took out the keys and left my SUV smack dab in the middle of the three-lane road, for all the morning traffic to enjoy. I went back to evaluate the damage when a man with a large nose and brawny physique stepped out of his car; a man I'd soon come to find out was from Poland and named, of all things, Barnabas Honorata. (Yes I wrote down the name because I thought it was so neat.) What a name I thought to myself. He apologized profusely in a heavy accent, one that had brought him to Panama for work. And we took note together that my car had virtually no signs of impact, less a scratch on the lower bumper in the shape of a mini New Jersey. There's a good feeling, one of power and imperviousness, when you get hit by another car yet experience no damage. And that pleasure was compounded when Barnabas Honorata and I then shifted our attention to his 2-door Speck which was in pretty bad shape; the front hood smashed like a crumpled sheet of tinfoil. We faced it. October sixth was not Barnabus' day. I took his insurance information in case anything came of our fender-bender and eventually got back into my car, alleviating all the traffic that had built up around our spectacular crash. If the accident had been more serious, we would have waited for the police who would have probably taken a few hours to arrive. Due to the crowdedness of the city, accidents like these happen quite frequently and they're not the end of the world. The fact that most people are driving around battered cars helps lessen the formality of it all, in that most often, the two parties will just agree to go on their merry way. Like a big old game of city-wide bumper cars. Car insurance is now mandatory in Panama City, although I went years driving without it. And it only costs a few hundred bucks a year, nothing compared to the larceny that goes on in the states. Accidents down here are like a way of life, and after five minutes or so on the morning of my 25th birthday, I simply went on to celebrate mine.
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| Last Updated ( Saturday, October 13 2007 ) | ||
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