Tropical Dreaming

We weren’t thrilled with it from the start — it was very dark inside (even on a bright day), the pool was dirty, all the furniture was uncomfortable and/or broken, and the ‘kitchen” had no sink! — but this morning, tree trimmers showed up early and took things to a whole new level of awful.

The sound of chainsaws would have sucked more than enough — but these guys were dropping huge tree limbs directly on our roof  with a huge CRASH! that sounded like a bomb had gone off!!

Poor TinkerBelle, in her (not quite) 2 years on the planet, the closest experience she had ever had to this was really loud thunderclaps. But huge tree limbs falling on your roof, while not quite as loud, is way more percussive. She was so freaked out.

And that wasn’t even the worst part.

As I was trying to get all of our stuff taken out and loaded into the car, I kept coming out to find big tree limbs on the sidewalk. (Along with tools and rope and debris.) So I’d have to wait for them to clear the sidewalk. (Meanwhile the clock was ticking and checkout time was getting closer and closer.)

Eventually, I got everything loaded and away we went… until I realized that I didn’t know how to get to our new place and my phone wasn’t working. (No service/data.)

One of the first-world luxuries that we take for granted is “611” which connects us to our cellular service provider — even when our service has been mysteriously suspended — so we can get the problem taken care of. If Panama has such a number/service, I don’t know what it is. So it was off to the mall to talk to Mas Movíl and figure out why our service had been disconnected — again. (Turns out they had tried to charge my card — the one that was cancelled due to fraudulent charges.)

Happily, this sad story ends well. Our new place is wonderful! Five days will go by much too quickly in Casco Viejo. But more on that in another post — and YouTube video!

And if we pay cash, we get charged $6.80 for every withdrawal (Panama law). This will change once all of our immigration stuff is settled because the service provided by our attorney is a package deal that includes opening a bank account — but we’re not quite there yet. Anyway…

Credit Card fraud hits us especially hard since A) the card has to be canceled (and now I have no credit card to pay for stuff without getting hit with foreign transaction fees), and B) a new card has to be sent out to me.

Back in the States, not a huge deal. The card shows up in the mail in a week or so; inconvenient but liveable. In Panama, though, “shows up in the mail” is a whole different ballgame. All the more so because the “home address” that the bank has on file for us is our mail forwarding address. Not the package forwarding address, but the mail forwarding address — where things get scanned and sent to us digitally but not physically.

So now, Anytime Mailbox is going to receive my new credit card, scan it, and send me a picture of it. And I’m going to have to get them to send it to someone else so they can send it to our package forwarding address so that it will ultimately get to me in Coronado. (But will it get there before we’ve moved on to our next place on April 5…?)

There’s even a problem with that, though… The people at Anytime Mailbox won’t physically forward mail until I jump through some hoops in which a test piece of physical mail is sent and received/verified. It might be faster to just have them shred the damn thing and ask the credit union to resend the card to the other (package forwarding) location.

What a headache. 🤕