Oh. David. Hello. Again.
I planned to take the night bus to Panama City tonight…
Once I decided to stay in David instead, I planned to stay at the same hostel…
Where I planned on having dog-shit smell and a lack of fan as my only…detractors…
I planned to avoid super skeezy and sketchy hotels where cockroaches are the friendliest guests.
As you may have guessed, I am not sitting on a bus right now. Nor am I heading to Panama City tonight. I just can’t seem to break up with David.
Dina, my Panamanian abuelita who shuffles around the other hostel, didn’t answer either of the bells (you know it’s a reliable place when they have two doorbell systems right next to each other) and I had seen the Pension Costa Rica just up the block from there, and it’s in my guide book (abuelita is not) so I figured I’d give it a try.
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| Hard to photograph a closet, but can you get the idea? |
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| These are wide angle, 18 mm, camera against the wall in the corner, and ISO 3200 even with the light on. |
The guide book says “Though in a handsome building…many of the rooms are musty and with walls that do not reach right up to the ceiling. Even so, they’re not bad.” Not sure if this is a case of deterioration, showing the guide book rep the best rooms, or me getting picky in my old age, but I would have described it more along the lines of “don’t let the lobby that looks like something out of a cowboy telenovela set in the 1880’s fool you, it’s four stained walls that don’t reach the ceiling and the gap on top is spanned by screens that block only 90% of the space. With the rusty metal springs of the bed, the novela wouldn’t be a romance, but more likely a prison story.”
Or maybe a Romeo & Juliet where the forbidding families are the cockroaches and the bed bugs… “What light through yonder musty hole in the wall breaks? Tis the East, and Juliet is a damn cockroach.”
We’ll see how the night goes (wish me luck) and I’ll be on that bus tomorrow morning if at all possible…
