Panama Real Estate Investment Travel Information


$1350 Cornflake from eBay to Panama

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Written by Matt Landau

Tuesday, April 01 2008

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When home in the US, I enjoy paging through the local and nationwide newspapers that my family and friends tend to leave open on their kitchen tables. Occasionally, I'll come across something that has been circled or underlined which, as a rule, gives a fascinating window into the lives of its readers.

For sale: three canaries of undetermined sex. I once read while visiting a friend in Richmond, Virginia. The ad went on: Great dames also for sale: eat anything, also fond of children. The remainder had been highlighted and decorated with stars as if to celebrate the fact that the acquisition of this little zoo had already occurred. What I could take from this was that my friend, whether he wanted to admit it or not, was seriously in the market for some friendship. "What about him Noah?" I pointed out on our way to lunch. "That cow would go great in your new animal kingdom."

On the occasion that the paper doesn't contain juicy insight into the social status of my friends, I also enjoy reading the various news stories of the nation. Take the time I fondled through the section called Living, for example to find an article about two sisters who auctioned a piece of cereal off for a small fortune. Sold! The headline read. Cornflake goes for $1350.

Call me crazy, but the first thought that ran through my head was how much money I might have sitting in my belly. The romantic might have taken the headline and begun to imagine what they would do with the hefty profit, perhaps using it to sweep their family away to an exotic island for a vacation of six or seven weeks. The year of the cornflake miracle they would title the pages of their photo albums as if finding that destined piece of cereal was as mythical as the arrival of a reborn phoenix.

But as much as I would like to tease, I found myself desperately trying to retrace all my steps from breakfast that morning to come up with anything that might have been shaped like the state of Illinois. That was however until I realized I had no idea what the state of Illinois is shaped like. Identifying something as Texas or California, maybe. But Illinois was just one of those mid-west states that, beyond crossword puzzles and the NCAA tournament, might as well have been eliminated for me.

The lucky cornflake sisters used a popular online auction site to get in touch with a man named Kerr, who I presumed spent his days searching for these kinds of things. "This isn't the first cornflake that Kerr has tried to buy" the newspaper article revealed. "He said he purchased a cornflake billed as the world's largest, but that by the time it was delivered it had crumbled into three pieces."

"FUCK!" I imagined Kerr screaming when the crumbs arrived via UPS. "What the FUCK do you think it means when I order FRAGILE on the shipping?"

What was it with this guy and his cornflakes? I went on to read that he reportedly spent over a week closely monitoring the auction, and while others might have done so around various daily chores or between assignments at work, something tells me that in the Kerr household, the Illinois cornflake auction was the main show.

It was this kind of appeal that I had come to expect from American newspapers. Shapes of states, spelled out curse words, and faces of holy folk were appearing in everything from cinnamon rolls to mashed potatoes and the amazing part was not that they were being recognized, but rather that they were being SOLD! To one another, Americans come off as a passionate and devoted people. To outsiders, we come off as freakin nuts.

While content of equal entertainment value might exist, an Illinois cornflake auction article is not one you'll ever find in a Panama newspaper. Murders, political scandals, the increasing price of milk; now those are common topics. I brought the cornflake article back to Panama however, and showed a couple friends who thought I had fashioned it in Adobe Photoshop.

"Cornflake? For a thousand bucks? No, man. That's impossible" my friend Carlos confided. He looked at the cover of the newspaper to assure that it was the real thing. "You know how many beers you could buy for that money man?"

Newspapers in Panama look and feel just like their counterparts in the US. While some may claim them to be of serious political sway, both La Prensa and La Critica (sold on street corners everywhere) are quite handy in terms of things a Panamanian should know about his country. The cost is a little cheaper and the language is all wrong, but if you flip through one at a friends' house, the ink still rubs off on your fingers the exact same way.

Lovely newspaper image used from http://www.webtvwire.com/news-bytes-of-the-week-2/