Return to Panama City

We’re back in Panama City and working furiously on our report which we hope to have nearly finished before leaving for Peru next Sunday.

A beautiful Panama City skyline

We took a break from the stress earlier this week to go get my hair cut. The humidity in Panama turns my hair into something resembling Diana Ross’ hair-do, it is truly awful. So I figured now would be as good a time as any to just get as much of it as possible chopped off. I went to a nice looking hair salon in a strip mall, and Leilani was nice enough to come along for moral support.

As I sat down in the chair I asked the stylist how much this haircut was going to cost me, hoping to avoid a surprise charge of something crazy like $100 later. He said eight dollars and thirty-five cents. As much as I could get onboard with that low price I now began to get nervous about what kind of haircut I was going to get for only eight dollars—this was made worse by the fact that he began patting my hair and smoothing it down in a way that did not inspire confidence that he had much experience cutting hair or had been through some kind of school or program. He seemed perplexed by my hair.

Next he took his water bottle, sprayed my hair down, and began to cut large sections of hair straight across with the scissors, rapidly. And I mean large sections. I’ve never seen anything like it. As I saw chunks that constituted at least one-fourth of my hair falling to the ground in one swoop I was about to have a heart attack, but the thing with hair cutting is that there is no good time to tell someone to stop cutting your hair, because I didn’t want him to stop half way through. I ended up with a bit of a duck-tail in the back but avoided having some pretty awful bangs added to the haircut. All I have to say is: it will grow out (hopefully sooner rather than later).

The rain continues in Panama City almost every day, and ruined our planned beach trip on Saturday. But when I hear about how hot it is back home this summer in D.C., I have to say that I would take 80-some degree weather with a lot of rain over 110 degree weather any day. It feels rather tropical here. We have a balcony and a hammock and that is all I need to relax after a long day of typing interviewing notes, coding them, and writing non-stop.