Sheep Guarding Llama

It is Monday.  Mostly a normal week for us.  Two weeks straight of being at “home” in Panama without any traveling of any sort, not even on the weekend.

Dominica took the girls down to go swimming this afternoon.  They did not swim for a really long time but the big accomplishment today was that Liesl managed to swim, completely on her own, without floaties!!  This is a huge day.  She is only doing short distances but she is really do it.

This evening Liesl played Dust: An Elysian Tale for more than an hour.  By the end of the evening she had progressed from 13% completed when she started to 16%.  It is slow moving but she is getting to be pretty good at the game.  It is pretty impressive to watch her playing it.

Tonight, after the girls went to bed, Dominica fired up BioShock on her laptop and got it to stream over to my Mac which is plugged into the television and we played about half an hour, just enough to show that the game worked and get into it a tiny bit.  We have been waiting a year or more to play BioShock.  We have owned it but Dominica really wants to watch me play it.  It is far more her kind of game than mine, it is rather scary, but it is too scary and intense for her to play on her own so she needs me to play it and her just to watch.

Streaming from the Windows laptop to the MacBook over the cheap wireless in the apartment actually worked acceptably.  It was not the best, but it was functional.  The game seems like it is going to be okay.  Would be nice if we had a better setup for playing it, using the Lenovo streaming to the Mac hooked to the TV introduces some lag and none of the machines is all that powerful and we have to scale up from 720p for the TV to work so the graphical quality is not what it could be.  It’s a cheap Sony Bravia TV too.  So layers on layers of less than ideal setup.  That is one thing that is very hard to deal with being so remote.  We can never have good stuff like this.

We had had lots of potential plans today: return to the lagoon, hit the beach, go to the all inclusive resort.  But once the day got started everyone was tired and we were all very happy to just stay in the apartment, watch some television, play some video games and basically just relax.  Yesterday was stressful and exhausting, partially because of all of the sun, and we needed a total “down day.”

We spent the whole day at the apartment.  Liesl is very excited to be playing Minecraft on the laptop(s) now, I bought the full version of it for her yesterday as the version on the computers is far more complete and complex than the limited mobile version from the iPad that she has been using thus far.

It is Saturday and our first really big weekend staying here at the apartment in Rio Hato / Playa Blanca.  We wanted to attempt a weekend of just enjoying our time here and using, at least a little, of the resources that came with our apartment.

First thing this morning I went on a scouting mission on foot to the far side of the lagoon to see if I could figure out how we get to it and if there really was a playground over there for the girls.  It wasn’t a bad walk, although it was pretty warm, and I managed to discover how the resort was laid out and now I have a far better idea of where everything is or is likely to be.

We decided to take the kids to the playground and to the lagoon for the day.  We are going to have a nice, relaxing day and let the kids do stuff that they have been wanting to do. It’s an “all kids” day, basically.

We got the kids ready and took the long, hot walk over to the lagoon.  We started at the playground which was quite nice and basically empty.  The girls had fun but did not play for nearly as long as we had thought or hoped.  They have been so playground deprived for so long that we were sure that they were going to spend hours on there.  It was a nice playground too and on grass which was nice given the heat.  But they only played for twenty minutes or maybe half an hour tops before wanting to go into the lagoon.

The lagoon is the largest salt water pool in the new world and the second largest in the world after one in Dubai (of course.)  There were a few dozen people in it so it was essentially empty.  The distance between us and the nearest people was many times the length of a normal pool.

The girls swam on their own for a while.  The pool was really shallow, only a few inches, near the beach which made it really easy for the girls to ease into it and just play in the water.  Dominica and I sat out on the beach chairs for a while.  I picked us up piña coladas from the beach bar which were pretty good.  This was more of how we pictured Panamá.

After a while Liesl and Ciana were really hungry so I put in an hour walking around trying to find how to get food.  I managed to get the resort kitchen to open and make us the one thing that we could eat from their menu – octopus ceviche!  It took a really long time and I had to deliver the food a very long way across the resort but I got the food to the family and the girls liked it but ate very little of it.  Dominica and I ate most of it.  It was pretty good.

After the food the girls went back into the lagoon.  I went in to watch them and to cool off a little and this is when disaster struck…. I had had my phone in my swimsuit pocket while exploring the resort looking for food and did not realize it as I am normally very careful not to do that and the water got higher than I knew before I thought about the fact that it was hitting my pockets and when I reached down to my pocket to check…. my phone was already submerged in the salt water.

So that was that.  The phone wasn’t just in bad shape, it was completely and utterly dead.  Nothing left to it.  Not even a flicker.  This is pretty bad as we are in rural Panamá and there is absolutely no way to do anything about the phone from here.

That turned a fun day into a really stressful one.

We stayed at the lagoon for a couple more hours before coming back to the apartment for an hour or two to shower, cool down and relax.  We had finally figured out where the Lebanese restaurant in the complex was located and decided to try it out tonight.

In the evening we walked to the resort again and went to Beirut for dinner.  It was good, not fantastic, but good.  A little difficult to order as the menu was Arabic food in Spanish with zero English to assist us.

Dinner was nice and we really appreciated the change of pace that it provided for us that we were able to go to a regular restaurant.

It’s Friday leading into a quiet weekend here in Rio Hato.  This morning Dominica made a Panamanian breakfast for us.  Scrambled eggs and peppers with Panamanian tortillas which are thick corn cakes, very different from tortillas in other regions.  More like polenta cakes.  Dominica has been frying up tomatoes now regularly too, something that she learned from Rachel while we were in Spain.  Rachel fried tomatoes for breakfast every day while we were there.

This weekend we are staying here in Rio Hato.  No leaving the area for us.  Last weekend we did some driving and in a week we are going to Panama City but this is our lazy weekend at home, time to relax and try to get to know where we are a little bit.  We kicked around the idea of using the all inclusive resort features one of the days.  We will see if we decide to do that or not.

It was hot today so I stayed in the kitchen working most of the day.  I try to move around depending on the weather, heat and how I am feeling.  There is no great place to work.  That is my biggest challenge with all of the moving, finding a place where I can really work comfortably.

Thursday.  It was bright, sunny and extremely windy out on the balcony today.  Dominica tried eating Rocklets, the Chilean competition for M&Ms and the wind was so strong that it blew them away!

MangoLassi was super busy today.  One of the busiest days yet.

We’ve been addicted to watched Mental Floss today.

Tonight we had our one big storm of our time in Central America.  It started by surprise in the evening and hit really, really hard.  One of the biggest storms I’ve ever seen in my life.  The weather radar showed it hitting several countries!  It was hitting Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panamá, Columbia and Venezuela all at the same time with us more or less in the middle of it.

It was completely crazy.  The furniture was blowing around on the deck and the power went out a few times, but the Internet only dropped while our router was rebooting, we actually never lost connectivity from our ISP.  There was so much wind and rain that water was coming in the windows and a puddle formed in the living room!

The storm went on all evening and into the night.  It was a lot of fun to get to watch it.  The girls were quite excited.  Some of the hardest rain that I have ever seen.

It was a treat to get to see a real rainstorm while in the rain forests (more or less) of Central America.  This is more of what we thought that it was going to be like.  It has been an extremely dry summer.