After a few days more with some resistant fever (although an advil shot would lower it for 8 to 12 hours), Leia is finally getting better. She is definitely feeling better given her eagerness to play, and fortunately the antibiotics didn’t provoke any secondary effects like diarrhea or skin rash. Actually her everyday papaya with … Read more
After little more than a week coughing, sneezing and intermittent fever, we decided to take Leia to the ER at Punta Pacífica Hospital when she got up this morning with 39.6ºC and coughing hard. We contacted Adara’s paediatrician (Adara is the Mexican friend we met queueing at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris flying to … Read more
After a week waiting for painters that are a disaster and an electrician that never showed up (although he would swear to god that he was on his way when you called him), we finally moved in our new apartment in Ocean Two tower at Costa del Este. The flat is empty: no furniture but … Read more
During the first week here we hired a driver to go around. Now that we know a little bit the city (and bought a local sim card to have Google Maps and Waze up and running on my smartphone…), we rented a car and started driving around by ourselves. I have driven in countries such … Read more
Expats make a significant segment of people living in Panamá. Multinationals like Procter & Gamble or Philips have regional offices here, but there are also a lot of construction companies building up the country’s canal, bridges over it and its skyscrapers. There are lots of brazilian engineers from Constructora Norberto Odebrecht, french engineers from Vinci … Read more
After some back and forth at times tough negotiation, we finally got the lease for the price we wanted and for 2 years. Tomorrow we are going there with Maria, from Nicaragua, who’s our best candidate so far to become our nanny and cleaning/cooking lady. We’re buying cleaning products in order to prepare our moving … Read more
Today we are enrolling her for good at Ohana Kids, a great nursery school we found in Costa del Este.
Today I had three good news: 1. The offer we made for that great apartment appears to have been accepted. After some some hardball negotiations in which we got the price that we wanted, the landlord will install curtains and paint the apartment, we should be signing the contract in the next few days and … Read more
Tomorrow the newly elected president of Panama Mr. Varela will replace outgoing president Mr. Martinelli. It’s a holiday and many festivities are programmed. I guess our to-be-landlord took a long week-end and that might be the reason we didn’t receive (so far) any answer to our offer to rent an apartment. The only thing I … Read more
Seeing all these expats with their wives and kids reminds me of my school years in São Paulo at the French “Lycée”: most of my friends were either expat kids, jewish or franco/belgo-brazilian kids… A Third Culture Kid (TCK) is a person who has spent a significant part of his or her developmental years outside … Read more