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From David we took a very nice bus all the way to our final desintation in Central America - Panama City!
After 3 months on the road, experiencing a variety of villages, towns and cities with various levels of comfort and aesthetic quality, Panama City was a welcome sight. A fairly large and very cosmopolitan place with lots of cool modern skyscrapers wrapping around a Pacific Ocean bay.
Our first view was over the Panama Canal bridge whereby the big impressive skyline appeared over the hill. Dave and Emily getting excited at the thoughts of shopping centres, cinemas, supermarkets, world class restaurants and hundreds of buildings for us to spend plenty of time being Architecture geeks!
So we arrived and checked into a very nice ´hostel´ which was really a nice flashy apartment building with all the mod cons, and then ventured across the road to an amazing sushi restaurant, tasty indeedy.
We ventured further afield on the next day to Casco Viejo (the old city) which was very interesting if a little faded and abit sketchy. We took a taxi to this part of town ( Emilys negotiating skills are coming up trumps to avoid rip off taxi drivers!) where we ended up with a crazy driver who sang all the songs on the radio at the top of his voice, also playing imaginary keyboard on his dash, and shouted at the passing school children to 'study hard!!´
Whilst in the old town we went to what we thought was a traditional Panamanian restaurant, we were suspect when the interior was really trying too hard, especially rather embarrased waiters dressed in ridiculous ´traditional dress'. Food was nice though! When we returned to our hostel the owner explained to us that the owners of that restuarant are in fact Venezuelan.
We of course were mainly here to see the engineering wonder that is the Panama Canal. We first of all visited a cool museum where we tried to no purchase the English audio tour as surely Dave can read fluent Spanish by now.....but we were wrong and had to go back to the reception with our tails between our legs and request the English audio...
We also went to visit one of the Canal Locks and took an amazing train trip along the Canal......but that is for the next blog entry!
So we have enjoyed the luxuries of a big western city while we can. In a few days we leave Central America for the unknown of South America, the story continues......
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