Panama Update #35
August 21, 2008
Nikki had her second Spanish class last night. I shared a taxi with her and the other 2 women from the dorm who are taking the classes with her. While she was in the class, I ate at the vegetarian restaurant on the same block (Via Argentina) and then she joined me after the class. In the meantime, the guy who is renting the apartment that I looked at yesterday called back and said another one opened up in the same building and we decided to go look at it after dinner. It was about 9:00 PM at night when we went over there. I thought it would be a good idea to see the area at night to get a feel for what it is like. The unit is a loft and a little bigger than the one I had looked at the previous day, but about the same price- $850. The bedroom was in the loft and which is big enough to also be like a living room. The downstairs is the kitchen, bathroom and dining room. The entrance way has a nice lobby. He took us on a tour of the whole building. The family eventually plans to live there. It is really nice and the whole thing is newly renovated. They have big plans for the building including 5 rooms for a B&B, a restaruant on the ground level, and several apartments to rent. There is an outdoor courtyard on the inside of the building that you can access from the apartment door. They left a lot of 200 year old exposed brick in the apartment we looked at. The neighborhood is in transition, like I wrote yesterday, but there are a lot of nice stores, bars, restaurants, and the Teatro Nacional, which is supposed to have real good, classical theatre in Spanish. There is also a really popular Backpackers Youth Hostel a couple of blocks away which the guidebook says is really nice and very reasonable. We wrote our contact there an email this morning with several questions about move-in dates, utilities, and several other things. If we hear back and all the answers are satisfactory, we are pretty interested. I also put an "apartment wanted" posting on Craigs List Panama and got two emails today with information about available places. We may go look at one tomorrow or over the weekend.
