¡panama!

Dudes! I´m in Panama. So far I have eaten shark; attempted to surf; ridden out a deadly apocalyptic disaster epic rain/wind storm that knocked out all the power and clogged the main road into town with dead trees; taken a three-hour Spanish class; lived in a bamboo hut; been sunburned; met a pretty convincing version of The Dude and an Argentinean chef who looks like Mikhail Baryshnikov; been attacked by a moth; showered with bats; and collected three mundane bug specimens all of which are harmless and available on the homefront. So the Bug Chart I had planned to assemble is pretty sparse as yet, but on the other hand, the Bug Chart is pretty sparse as yet.

Am currently living at a Spanish language school (on-campus dorm! kind of) in Boquete, a little mountain village full of coffee and flowers and rain. The night we got here (I am traveling with a dude called the International Crocodile, a name he got from a one-eyed drunken stranger), a massive and chaotic storm attacked the town - everyone lost power, and it didn´t come back on until last night (three days later). But folks were generally cheerful about the situation, and candlelight makes even a soggy bed in a damp cinderblock room seem fairly cozy. The current plan is to brush up on the español and then arrange a trip to the San Blas, which, if you look them up online, you´ll discover are ludicrously perfect-looking desert islands surrounded in unrealistically blue sea. I´ll upload some photos later on but basically, from what I´ve seen, just imagine the prototype of the palm tree/white sand/turquoise water/cute hut/walk across it in three minutes type of island, and you´re pretty much there.
More soon!
xo