Andres Bello Park, AKA Muscle Beach Panama

This is an installment in an ongoing post series detailing a typical day in one of our destinations. Not everything in this schedule might happen on any given day, but it should give you a good idea of our usual activities.

6:00AM – The building starts to come to life. Our walls are seemingly pretty thick, but the door is paper-thin, meaning we hear the earliest of early birds (and their kids) thump through the halls or down the stairs each morning (or, as the case may be, at 4:00am after a night out on the town).

8:00AM – After some coffee, tea, emails, work, etc. it’s time for dogs’ morning walk. All of El Cangrejo (our neighborhood) usually smells like coffee at this hour; the roasting facility is directly behind our building, so the smell is strongest right outside our door.

8:30AM – We settle in to our work days. Perhaps today I’ll start on the bed. Maybe I’ll move to the table at some point. I might even move a chair by the bed and sit on the chair and rest my legs on the bed. It’s all terribly exciting.

10:00AM – Our maid may or may not come on any given day. I put this in at the 10:00 slot because that seems like a normalish time for a maid to come by – I’ve never really had one so I don’t know for sure. Anyway, when we first checked in we were told we could utilize the maid service as much or as little as we want. We figured we would just play it by ear since she was around everyday we would let her know a day or two ahead of time if we might want her to come by to take the trash, replace our towels, or change the sheets. Trying to set appointments, however, seems pretty fruitless. Basically she comes by when she feels like it and does whatever tasks she feels like doing when she comes. We’re pretty sure she 1) hates us, 2) is terrified of our dogs, or 3) just isn’t very enthusiastic about being a maid.

12:00PM – Off we go to get in a workout at Parque Andre Bello, a seven minute walk from our apartment. In the cool evenings, the park is full of people exercising on machines, playing soccer on the turf field, shooting hoops, or just walking and enjoying the atmosphere. But not us. No, no, no. We prefer to work out when the park is absolutely empty. This, of course, also happens to be the worst possible time of day to work out, with the hot sun blazing down, constricting the air, and turning t-shirts into ten pound sweat rags. The few people gazing down from balconies or walking through the park on their way somewhere stare at us like we are crazy idiots. Which we are.

1:00PM – Lunchtime this month has been salads and rolls with peanut butter. Pretty exciting stuff. Then it’s back to work.

5:00PM – We have been hungry early this month, and dinner has been inching closer and closer to five o’clock. I feel like this maybe makes us lame, but I can’t really come up with a good reason why.

Eveningtime – Writing, listening to the Royals (they kind of fell off the end of the world there huh?), pizza, and visiting the two(!) neighborhood microbreweries have all been normal occurrences, but planning out our upcoming jump of the Darien Gap into Colombia has probably taken up the largest chunk of time. Seriously, this is a pretty complicated ordeal. We’ll have much more to tell about it very soon.

8:30PM – Evening walk, then checking out for the night.

This picture has been included for no particular reason.