The quest for organic veggies

You would think in the tropics that vegetables would abound. Lots of starchy veggies yes, but lettuce, tomatoes and other broad leaf plants, not so. Yesterday at the super market we saw baby spinach from Salinas for $7.25 a small box. Not on our list! So every week we make the trip up the hill to El Valle to buy organic veggies from Thomas the organic farmer and his family. He has been workireat funng the same farm for 25 years and it is a model of sustainability. And it is great fun looking for and picking the lettuce, onions, carrots, and other stuff and then weighing the harvest and playing with their kids and dogs. The bill is about $15 bucks and it tastes great.

(Still haven't figured how to place the picture next to the text. They always end up at the top. If you know how to put them other places tell me!)

And while we are there sometimes we go next door to a very fancy hotel called los Mandarinos and have a look (or occasionally lunch). When we are at Thomas’ we see the los Mandarinos staff gathering and buying their own food. El Valle is round valley about 2900’ in elevation and a micro climate of cool days and much more rain than San Carlos. Great veggies and flowers. That’s what happens when you live in an extinct volcano not unlike Jurassic Park. As a matter of fact Thomas even has a dinosaur garden complete with plastic beasts in among the leaves.

I'm going to have a salad.

My wife has become a kilowatt junkie

I don’t know how much more energy efficient the United States has become in the past four months but I bet the rest of the world is still way ahead of it. In Panama where electricity is typically $.20 a kilowatt people are very careful how they use it. And anywhere that light bulbs are sold there is often nothing but compact fluorescent bulbs. You know, those funny looking things with the little white tubes looping around. Well now they produce up to 125 watts according to the label. And they give good light but according to Linda it is just too white to read with. So on every shopping trip Linda looks for and comes back with a treasured incandescent bulb…. The plain old light bulb. And we have a few around in our house for reading and quite a few spares as those wear out (and they do pretty fast). As an old energy management guy I wince when I know that the reading bulb is using 5 or 10 times as much juice as the new ones, but what the hell, I only read a couple of hours a night if that.
Now I gotta turn out the light.

The Fire Cracker People of New Years

Want to blow up your favorite celebrities, enemies or adversaries? Well the People along the Panama Highway near our house have a way. They make up dummies of the character they love, despise, or are upset with in some way and fill the dummy with firecrackers. Often you recognize the dummy as a politician or Bart Simpson or a celebrity with a sign telling who it is. This tradition started with the local Indians making dummies with heads painted on coconuts and stuffing old clothes for shape. Now the practice has refined itself and spread geographically along Highway for twenty miles. There is even a judging and awards with money given out and on New Years Eve the dummies are for sale so you can take them home. I have included a few pictures of the dummies some of which are works of art. The dummies are just appeared right after Christmas until New Years Eve when at midnight they are all BLOWN TO SMITHEREENS! Talk about closure!

And since fireworks are legal in Panama the celebration of the New Year is very loud and sparkley. We have a friend and her twelve year old twins here so the best way to bring in the New Year was to light it off! We went to the beach with rockets, sparklers, and other exploding gizmos and after had set off all of our stuff we witnessed at least three major major displays put on by private parties up and down the coast. It was as good as any 4th of July I have ever seen. The after midnight the discos open with live music and dancing until 6 am. We closed the windows and turned on the AC and went to sleep. After all, Linda had to get up real early to go surfing and I wanted to write this episode.