Día 11: Practicando Pretérito y Apoyando a los Vendedores

This morning, we arrived at class and quickly completed our lesson on preterito imperfecto. This included some practices with listening to stories and filling in the blank with the proper conjugation of verbs. We thought this would be relatively straightforward since we have been working hard to master this tense all week, but there are always some irregularities that catch us off guard.

Hector then shared a brief lesson on the difference between muy and mucho. We found that muy normally translates to “very” and mucho translates to “a lot.” Whether or not you use mucho/muchas/mucha/muchos depends on the location of verbs, pronouns, adverbs, and sustentivos (nouns). We did well on the worksheet practice, but the speaking practice is challenging since your mind has to take the time to visualize the sentence. We felt like we were talking like sloths and we hoped our more fluent classmates didn’t doze off too much. 

The final part of our morning was putting together preterito imperfecto and preterito indefinido by recounting old children's stories and telling them to the class. Since our classmates are from different countries, it was interesting to hear what stories are traditional. For example, they had never heard of “Hansel and Gretel.” After a quite a few corrections from Héctor, we felt closer to differentiating the tenses and finished up class for the day with casual conversation. 

After this productive morning, we went out to lunch and enjoyed some fish tacos, crab and spinach dish, and smoked salmon pizza. Quite the assortment of seafood, but all very delicious! 

One thing we have noticed about Panama is that the restaurants tend to look rather “shabby” from the outside, but on the inside they are architecturally magnificent. This restaurant looked ready for an interior design photoshoot. With full bellies, we decided to brave the afternoon heat. 

We wandered around to look at the shops and interact with the vendors of Casco Viejo. We quickly learned that if you showed ANY interest in the items for sale, they will flock you with options and descriptions (beware). In many of the shops, almost all of the vendors are selling the exact same items which was puzzling. It reminded us what we had observed in our freshman trip to Jamaica. Most of the items are beachy-looking clothes (more holes than clothing - like a net), license plates, magnets, beaded jewelry, and traditional Panamaniam hats. While the license plates may seem like the “odd man out” in these shops, in the past, Panamanians have been required to change their license plates each year, so the discarded ones end up being sold to tourists. A recent law has stated that now license plates can be changed every five years. 

After some perusing, we found more traditional items handmade in Panama by the locals. This included glass blown animals, jewelry, hand painted art, hats, and animals carved out of tagua seeds which come from ivory palm trees. While these seeds have some similarities to coconuts they are bigger and shiny on the inside. We were drawn to one shop that stood out because the jewelry for sale did not fit into the sea of “the same stuff.” Rather than braided thread, it featured jewelry with colorful beads and gold letters. The vendor was lovely and patient with our Spanish and helps us create stacks of necklaces and bracelets to take back as souvenirs. We made quite a dent in her supply, but she has now moved up an income bracket. 

After about an hour of exploring and talking with the vendors, the sweat had soaked through our shirts so we decided to take a quick stop at our favorite gelato place to cool off. The four of us chose Vanilla&Chocolate, Coffee, Nutella, and Mint Chocolate Chip gelato. If you correctly match the people to their flavors, we will bring you back a Panamanian fishnet outfit. This sweet stop was the perfect pre-grocery run snack, so then we headed to the store for one last time. We just needed a singular onion for tonight’s recipe, but the Panamanians only sell their onions in huge netted bags. We were forced to buy like eight onions, and we leave in two days! Oh well - our breath will be smelling great tonight.

The rest of the night was relaxing and restorative, with Sutton joining a long distance Rice Business School information session. Josey worked on her homework of transcribing a story for our class the next day and, of course, made us a delicious dinner. We enjoyed rice, beans, tortillas, and broccoli (fridge clean-out meal). Tomorrow is our final full day  - muy trieste! :(