Thursday, December 18, 2008

Two Adventures



Today we went on two adventures. First, this morning we took a boat ride into Almirante to buy groceries. Marcie's family is coming for Christmas so we needed to buy LOTS of food. Almirante is...interesting. It is basically one intersection, no stops signs or lights, with a store on three of its corners, two grocery-like stores and one "gift" store. We were suppose to meet the beef man in town to buy ground beef, but he didn't show. So when the chicken truck pulled up, we bought a box of chicken off the back of the truck- guess we will be eating only chicken when my family comes. As for our grocery list, it was hit or miss. Some items we had bought the week before, were no where to be found. Then there is the fresh fruit and vegetable situation. Let me describe the largest "fruit and vegetable" stand...he had 5 soccer ball sized watermelons, 20 apples, 5 sorry looking celery bunches, a pile of tomatoes, a stack of garlic and a few carrots. Needless to say, we have been eating lots of canned fruits and vegs. We piled all our full blue Meijer bags into the boat for our trip home. Once home, we put all our groceries in the back of the "mule" to take them up to our villa.

In the evening we had our second adventure, going out for dinner. A couple from Austria has just opened a restaurant on a neighboring island. They built a domed oven to make pizzas. They are open for dinner on Friday nights and Sunday lunch. At 5pm a water taxi driver came to pick us up for our 30 minute boat ride to the pizza hut...literally a hut...thatched roof, open all the way around with two picnic tables and three card tables. We ordered two pizzas and they were delicious!!! There were many other gringos there (non-Panamanians) and we had a great time meeting other English speakers. The boat ride home was a bit intense as it was pitch dark, but Junior, the boat driver found our villa without a problem.

1 comment:

bwinkle said...

The food situation sounds like when we were in the Bahamas. We never knew what we were going to get in terms of fruits and veggies; milk was in question at times too! I hope your parents made it safely, I'm sure different faces will be nice to see:)