I Corazon Panama

I arrived in Panama City safe and sound this morning. Unfortunately I spent way too long waiting to check in for my flight because I was stuck behind about a dozen Puerto Rican hunters with lots of armas del fuego (that's firearms) to check. But the flight was quick, only about an hour and a half on a small plane. I happened to get a window seat and snapped this picture of ships lining up to go through the canal:



I thought I was so clever until I realized that everyone else was looking out the windows on the other side of the plane at the striking skyline of Panama City. It's not quite a shot from the plane, but here's the amazing high rise-ness that now surrounds me:



Driving into the city I felt like I was in the US, a divided highway with signs with locations and distances and even billboards! And now I have all kinds of food and shops and mostly food at my fingertips! I'm quite excited, if you can't tell. But I'm also here for a non-food-related reason and saw the doctor right away this afternoon. My trip to the Canal and other interesting places around the city will have to wait till I get through some more doctory stuff the next couple days. But I'm definitely in good hands, there's a staff person here whose sole job it is to take care of volunteers here on medevac, so he picked me up and took me to my appointment and told me to think of him as my bodyguard. Later he said he'll take me on a little tour of the city/neighborhood so I'll have more pictures soon.