Panama Update #30
August 14, 2008
Today I met a guy for lunch at a restaurant downtown called Costa Azul. I caught a taxi over there and the taxi driver recognized me from 2 weeks ago when he gave us a ride back from Casco Antigua. After a few minutes I remembered him by the picture of his daughter he has on the dashboard. He was really friendly and we chatted on the way. The last time we were in the taxi he called me Harrison Ford because of the hat I was wearing. He reminded me about that and then I remembered him very well. I was thinking that I would start running into taxi drivers that I had previously met since we are taking them so much. I am not sure how many taxis are in this city of 700,000, but somebody said it is around 10-15,000.
The Mariott Hotel is right near-by along with other bars and restaurants with a lot of foot and car traffic. Costa Azul is open 24 hours a day and is very popular from what I have heard and read. It is reasonably priced ($6-10 per entree) and is mostly meat and fish dishes. I only saw one vegetarian dish on the menu, fried rice with vegetables, so I ordered that. I was surprised that it tasted pretty good with no negative after-affects like you get with some restaurant food. I wouldn't go back to that restaurant again, but right next store to it I discovered a very nice vegetarian restaurant that we didn't know about before. That restaurant is called simply, "Comida Vegetarian" and serves the food cafeteria style. I went in to look at the food and it had all sorts of tofu, potatoe and other vegetable dishes. About half of them looked deep-fried, including the tofu, and dishes that looked like Pacora at the Indian restaurants.
The guy I met at the restaurant is a guy who responded when I put an ad on one of the Panama Yahoo groups. He is the moderator of that particular web group. He said he had an idea for me on how to market the Yoga class to a wider audience. He is a 67 year old retired marketing/advertising guy from Miami. He moved to Panama 3 years ago by himself and put an ad on the internet. He eventually met and married a Panamanian woman. He said it is working out quite well. She is younger than him, but only by a few years, and is very well educated with a nice job. He said that she moved into his apartment and left her house with her age 2o-something kids to live in. He said in Panama it is typical for the kids to stay at home until they are married.
His idea was to ask a hotel if you can use a room there for the classes and offer the guests free admission. He said in exchange to ask the hotel if other paying members could come from the community. He said he knows 20 people who would like to come to a class like that and pay good money. I told him that since I put that notice on the internet I have gotten a lot busier, but would let him know if I went in that direction. He said he would even write a press release which he would put into the local newspaper. He would do all this for free in exchange for free Yoga classes for he and his wife for a year.
