Panama City & Canal

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Well we arrived here yesterday morning after 24 hours on the road, this broke down into two bus rides, and the layover we had (that I mentioned) in my previous blog entry. Getting into Panama City was really cool, it´s by far more modern than any other Central American cities, a lot of things I hadn´t even seen since North America. The bus station we arrived in was completely enormous, reminded me almost exactly of the Airport in Phoenix. We hopped in a cab to find our hostel, and had an absolute nightmare of a time getting the cabby to find this place. Ryan describes the ordeal on his blog. We finally found it, checked in, and I headed right to bed for a nap, the semi-sleep I get on the bus is great for making it go quicker, but it doesn´t really count for real sleep and I find I get a bit exhausted the day after a night bus, but usually we just lay around anyways.

After my nap, we went and got some food, Ryan and Jord had already done some errands, we started looking into flights to various places in South America. After that we just hung out on the balcony of our hostel, it´s pretty cool because the hostel is in an 8 story building and we have beds in the "penthouse". John took us to this Arabic restaurant and I had some great Tabule and pineapple milkshakes! We went to go find King Kong in one of the Cine´s but the only english one playing didn´t start until 10pm and we were all still really tired from the lack of sleep the night before, plus we want to wake up early to visit the Canal.

Today I felt much better, but I had another horrible sleep, the room we were in is packed with 8 beds, people coming and going at all hours, then at about 3:30 these two french girls get into bed together (the bunk above me) and just start $&#@ing talking and kept me up for a bit before I almost lost it but just told them to be quiet, so pissed off though, who just starts a conversation at 3:30 AM??? Then the New York guy stumbled in totally wasted and well, it was just a constant rotation of noises waking me up.

After getting ready for the day, we jumped in a $5 taxi to the Canal! We got there a bit before it opened so we waited outside the gates admiring the ants and their amazing feats, almost forgetting the true purpose of this day trip, when we walked into the canal grounds and got to watch a bunch of boats go through the big Pacific lock. Was really awesome, the boats are so incredibly large and it was just odd seeing them in this weird ditch thing, it´s all a really slow process moving them through, but awesome to see first hand. We did a quick run through of the Musem and then back to town, got some food and plan to catch King Kong tonight!

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Photos

Canal
The Miraflores lock, this is towards the Pacific Ocean.

Panama City
Shot from our 8th floor penthouse!

Ants!
Mostly just playing with the settings on my new camera, but you would understand if you saw how AWESOME these ants were!

More Canal
Shot of the lock towards the Atlantic side, this lock raises the boats up so they can get into the lake.