It has been a week since I have written and I somehow manage to stay so busy. Our Spanish class had a neat week - we had offered to have our class here at the house so Wed. night we did that. I fixed snacks and we had 5 bottles of wine and class was a blast. Etzy our teacher and Rinske( she is from the Netherlands) the manager of Spanish on the River brought board games and good fun with them. Neither of the girls had ever had fruit pizza and loved it - in fact Etzy kept going to the pan for more. She is a great gal who just turned 30( shhh don't tell her I told her age) she went to England so that she could learn how to speak English then came back to Panama to teach young children. She ended up here in Boquete and for the first time is teaching adults and does find it a challenge at times- or maybe it is just us she has a challenge with!!! She is not sure how long she is staying here so hope we keep in contact with her. Oh and I do not think I mentioned that we all felt our Spanish and our accents improved more and more with each bottle of wine :)
We just may have to have class here again before our 6 weeks are up.
On Monday I started back with my yoga group. The group has changed but the teacher is one of the same ones I had last year. I discovered that 7 months without doing it made me so out of shape. I was smart enough not to do all the stretches but found myself really hurting. I will be back tomorrow and hopefully a little closer to reaching my toes. Already I can tell the difference though and am wondering why I got so lazy and did not continue when I was in Iowa.
I am sure you remember my past experience with 2 men and a machete, well this week Hillbilly asked me if I wanted to go see the land again as it is being cleared- of course I did. So back go on the rubber boots and we headed to the jungle. As we got closer to Caldera the rain started coming down but an unusual thing about Panama is that is can be raining one mile and sunshine the next so we proceeded on. We turned off onto the Caldera road and up ahead I could see something in the road - it looked like a rock slide but there were no rocks or high areas on either side of the road. As we got closer we found out that they were doing road repair, fixing the pot holes ( that can swallow a car at times) and since they do not have very many cones or barricades so they go into the ditches and and grab rocks and surround the area with theses huge rocks. Mile after mile we found ourselves not only dodging pot holes on one side of the road but rocks on the other. I should mention that Hillbilly could use a driving class anyway - I have grabbed onto the handle above the door to keep me from being thrown side to side and when I commented I was told it was get used to it or walk. On top of all this it was pouring rain.
We reached the turn off to his property and drove about a mile down this road that would jar a kidney stone loose then we reached the river - well I would call it a big creek but in Panama they are all rivers. It did not look too bad and across we went but the entire time Hillbilly is saying that it is raining too hard to even get out of the truck. We made it up the hill and pulled up to the fence - I could see through the rain that some of the land had been cleared but we did not get out . We probably sat there talking about 10 minutes and headed back down the hill, made the corner to the river and the first words out of his mouth were Oh shit- Now it did not take a brain surgeon for me to get the idea that this was not good. In the little time we were on his property the river had doubled in size. And yes this is the only way out. He put the truck into 4 wheel drive and across we went - I am not sure how high on the truck the water came but I can tell you that Dave had a look of relief when the truck got through it to the other side. This was the same day as our Spanish class here and it was crossing my mind that I almost did not make it back for it!!!! Oh well I have had worse things happen.
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