Monday – April 13, 2009

My spring break was last week and a bunch of us went to Panama for a few days. It was great. We stayed in Panama City for two days and then spent three days on a somewhat deserted island in the Caribbean. While we were in the city, the police ended up escorting us back to our hostel, three different times, in one day. The first time, we wanted to go see the Old City, so we took a bus. The bus driver told us it was the last stop, but when we got off at the last stop, we were just at a gas station, not at the ruins! The man who had been sitting next to me told me that we had passed it, that it was back where I had taken pictures of the ruins I had seen from the window (I didn’t realize then that the Old City was only ruins… I thought it was more like an older section of the city). So, we only had to walk back down the street a few blocks. Before I had even gotten off the bus, police officers came up to all of us and asked us where we were going. Since I knew exactly where we needed to go, I just pointed in the opposite direction and said, “That way.” Then they wanted to know what we were doing there and where we were trying to go. It turns out that we had arrived at a very dangerous part of the city and that we really shouldn’t have been there, even though it was the middle of the day. There were eight of us surrounded by at least five policemen. They called for a motorcycle escort for us to escort us back to the bus stop, make sure we got on the correct bus, to tell the bus driver where we should get off, to make sure we did get off at the correct stop, and then to make sure that we arrived at the ruins. The police even reported the number of the bus we arrived on and the driver’s name, all because he should have known that he should never have let us off his bus in this neighborhood. The strange thing is though, that I didn’t feel that unsafe. Could I really be that clueless? I’m not usually that oblivious in those kinds of situations… Anyways, we found ourselves in similar situations later that day – once when we were waiting for a cab (this time, a woman leaned out of her car as she was driving by and yelled at us in English, “You shouldn’t be here at night!”) and again when we went to the grocery store (where the storeowner stood in his doorway wearing a bulletproof vest and as we were escorted back by two more officers, a taxi driver drove by and remarked to no one in particular that “it’s very probable that you’re going to be robbed”).
The islands were great. There was no electricity, no water, no bathrooms, no buildings, no beds. And we were there for three days. Food was brought to us twice a day. Our breakfast was given to us by the indigenous family that lived on the island too. This island was less than 100 meters in diameter. You could see the ocean whichever way you looked. It was wonderful. Also, I talked to the 13-year old girl who lived there and she told me that she doesn’t like all the tourists and she would rather just live there with her family. I don’t blame her. Sometimes I wonder though, what people like that family must think of people like me, who spend a decent amount of money to live their lives for a few days. Their lives aren’t easy, and yet we pay so much money to live the way they do for our vacations. What must they think of us? When we go on vacation, I don’t feel as if we think that our lives are that horrible. And yet the fact that we leave our lives behind to live so basically makes me wonder if we actually do like how we live. Why else would we choose such a vacation? Does the family on that island ever want a vacation from their lives? And if they did, what would they choose?