I like your great site – thepanamapages.com .

Thank for your work for us!

I think it wasnt easy to post here so much information.

Regards

Nelson

I especially relate to your comment that "I didn’t come to Panama to speak English or chill with gringos."

I feel exactly the same way. I was very lucky to have had a dream job overseas. It was presented to me as: "How would you like to live in France for six months or so?" Well, did I really have something more pressing to do than to live on a million and a half dollar custom-built sailboat on the French Riviera?

I had been taking a conversational Spanish course when this opportunity arose, lol. All I could do in French was to count to ten and tell someone that my aunt's pen was on my uncle's desk.

For the first six months I really didn't make much of an effort to learn the language or interact with the French very much. But as the job lengthened with no end in sight for the next couple of years, that changed.

I got a French girlfriend who spoke hardly any English and I was forced to learn.

And a remarkable thing happened…I became part of the community. The number of Gringos, Brits and other English speaker I interacted with on a daily basis diminished to less than a half dozen.

At first French was nothing but noise…blah,blah,blah, blah.

Then a WORD would jump out of the static and I'd look it up in my plastic-covered Harrap's pocket dictionary. And it seemed as though there had been a meeting of all the French-speaking people the night before and they had agreed they would teach me THAT word today because everywhere I went all day long people were using that word.

Having learned the language and actually living with the French, I got to do to see and do things that the mono-tongued people who hung out at the expat bars never got to do or see.

After 3 years there I wouldn't, by any stretch of the imagination, say that I became FLUENT in French. Instead I became very PROFICIENT in the language. I could understand nearly everything I saw on TV or at the movies, and I could hold wonderful conversations with people. I was proficient to the point that when talking to someone in French I THOUGHT in French. I no longer thought in English and do a translation into French. I even DREAMED in French.

I have encountered the same xenophobia while on extended cruising in Mexico and Guatemala. Gringos rarely venturing away from the marinas where they couldn't speak English. If you're going to go abroad and associate with no one else but other Gringos, why the hell didn't you just stay home and watch the Travel Channel?

When I go somewhere outside the States I LOOK FOR where the natives hang out. THAT'S where the fun is.

…Actually, the cocodrilo with the guy up the tree would be a good cover. Maybe the croc could be holding a bottle of Abuelo in one…er…what do you call a crocodile's "hand?"