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It’s in Santa Ana which I like more than Escazu and Moravia (the other places in Costa Rica I have lived) and we are trying to get everything settled (got the blinds, waiting on the AC, trying to figure out how to import a sliding glass dog door from the states…) and moved in.

We finished the moving, and because the elevator is not yet running (it’s a new building) we did it all up the stairs. It was a pain but on the positive side it kick started my efforts to get back into shape. I’ve now been walking the dog in the neighborhood (and there are some great walks right nearby) and sleeping better. I’m even waking up early and getting a full night’s sleep which I rarely did in the last years (I am a night person and don’t usually sleep much).

I started my lil’ garden on the balcony and am having fun in the new place.

The TACA flight from San Jose, Costa Rica to Panama City, Panama took little over an hour, which was a welcome relief from longer visa trips I’d made and a lot better than the 18-hour bus ride it would have been if I’d given in to my anger at TACA and boycotted them. Arriving at the airport we checked out some of the large duty-free shopping area that I’d read about. It was fairly standard airport fare such as spirits, cigarettes and perfumes. I’d hoped to pick up a book to read but the airport surprisingly did not have a bookstore. There were also few eateries and the whole mini-mall in the airport was a repeat of the same gift shops you find in most airports. My girlfriend shopped at a Tommy Hilfiger store on the way back but I’d otherwise recommend you do your shopping outside of the airport as its convenience doesn’t offset the fact that it has little to offer.

We took a taxi to the hotel I’d planned on staying at only to find that it was fully booked, so we let a taxi driver take us to one of the hotels he obviously had a kick-back deal with (based on his sales job on the hotel). It was nothing special and I was sure we could find a much better hotel for the price but I didn’t want to spend the time looking so we checked in.

We were considering a visit to the duty-free zone Ciudad de Colon but it was a long trip (to the other coast of Panama) of several hours and I didn’t think we’d be doing enough shopping to merit the visit so we headed to one of their famous malls (the Albrook Mall) to achieve one of our two goals in Panama (shopping and visiting the canal). The mall was large and definitely much better shopping than anything you can find in Costa Rica, with much larger selection and much better prices. We ate and headed back to the hotel.

The taxis in Panama don’t use a meter, and they use a system of zones to determine fares, but they were very fair and within the city they were usually charging $1.50 to $3 and didn’t try to “stick it to the tourists” once with us, which is very different from many cities in the region that I’ve visited. They did, however, drive like absolute nuts as apparently is the custom in Panama. The regard for traffic laws (like the direction of traffic, stop lights and the basics) is much lower in Panama than it is even in Costa Rica, and the result is a lot of really frustrating traffic jams where everyone is trying to get through an intersection at once and refusing to give an inch. I saw a bus and a car face-to-face and the woman in the car honked like mad and yelled obscenities refusing to back up and let the bus continue its turn in front of her. The bus had muscled its was into the position and couldn’t go anywhere until the woman backed up and gave it space so onlookers shrugged and indicated to her to move or be crushed. She eventually did and we all moved a half car length forward.

The drivers and traffic are cartoonish and comical from afar but frustrating as hell as you realize the roads are fine and the traffic would not be too bad if the idiots would simply understand the notion of turns. As in green your turn, red their turn. Another curiosity were the flamboyant buses. Old American school buses are common in Central America where a lot of autos that are scrapped in the US end up. But in Costa Rica they often stay yellow and there are more typical passenger buses (manufactured in Brazil) that comprise most of the passenger fleet. But in Panama the overwhelming majority of passenger buses are private (as in the guy driving it may be the owner of the one-bus company) and they airbrush the buses and put lights inside. The blacklights inside look like a cheap disco and on the outside they resemble a hippy’s airbrushed van. They were very interesting!

Panama was very hot in comparison to Costa Rica’s central valley so we only visited the old city’s ruins briefly and headed off to visit the Panama Canal. We went to the Miraflores locks and had lunch in their restaurant and took the tour. It is an underwhelming sight as you can’t appreciate the full magnitude of the canal from this one vantage point (though it’s the best) but it was interesting enough. There was a ship in the locks upon arrival so we were able to see what we needed quickly and now I have seen the Panama Canal. I’ve always wanted to, but it’s really the least interesting tourist sight I have seen.

That afternoon we headed back to Albrook Mall we were close and we have a Multiplaza Mall in Costa Rica and though I’d like to have seen the Multicentro Mall (the largest in Central America from what I’ve read) I’m not big on shopping and took the lazy route. My girlfriend shopped for clothes while I looked for electronics. I didn’t find a lot of the items I was looking for (but I’m a geek and am looking for very specific high-end stuff) so I ended up doing that boring “watch your girlfriend shop” routine.

In the mall were the oddest mannequins I have ever seen. Nearly all of them had DD chest sizes and would look like exaggerations even on porn actresses. I thought it was bizarre but my girlfriend thought my interests were not cultural when I tried to point them out to her (I didn’t need to, if you caught one out of the corner of your eye you might flinch thinking they’d explode). The populace wasn’t thusly endowed so the clothes on the mannequins were often stretched till they were nearly threadbare. I really don’t get this marketing and can’t imagine that it works well.

All in all, it was another perfunctory visa trip, and from a Costa Rica resident’s point of view I can recommend Panama for it’s great shopping but can now say with relative certainty that Costa Rica’s neighbors to the north and south are simply nowhere near as interesting to travel in as Costa Rica.

Last trip I took with them (to Nicaragua) involved a checkin time of nearly an hour. That wasn’t an hour waiting in line or anything. It was nearly an hour at the desk waiting for them to get their asses out of their hands and get a simple, baggage-free checkin done. During that time the other 4 members of the staff huddled around one of their cell phones leaving the growing line behind us waiting the whole time as well.

Today I am calling TACA to pay for my tickets tomorrow. They tell me that I should pay over the phone because doing so at the airport would require arrival 4 hours before the flight. Now I’ve been calling them for about a week trying to pay them, but their credit card processing service is invariably off line and every time I’ve called so far they have dropped the call while transfering or holding, requiring me to start all over again.

This is the most ridiculous level of competence I’ve seen in an airline in all my life. A damn shame they don’t have enough competition in the region to make this change.

But if you can, avoid TACA!

This may well be the worst book I’ve ever read. And at nearly 900 pages it may have actually made me dumber. He could have done so well with it, he had great touches and I still maintain he is a great writer. But the alien invasion plot was just so incredibly stupid that nothing could make it a good book.

King is a good writer who needs someone (Tabitha?) to smack him upside his head when he gets a ridiculous idea like the “shit weasels”.

I had expected a more evil Hyde, but it’s a positively mild evil everyone in the story is up in arms about and I suppose most of the horror in the tale is lost over time as the novelty of the concept and the specter of medical miracles of that nature no longer holds sway.

In any case, it was an unremarkable story for the most part. I wondered how it might be different if I didn’t know of Dr. Jekyll’s alter ego but there is nothing I could do about that. I thought the ending, with Dr. Lanyon’s involvement was a nice little part of the plot but to me the story really boils down to Henry Jekyll’s Full Statement of the Case, the final chapter.

In it, Jekyll touches on the good and the evil within all, and puts a much more personal face on a psychological struggle within himself. The story is the better for it because it neither invoked horror nor excitement and the deeply tortured individual is the most interesting thing going.

Reading the final chapter I wondered if the book would have been better to have left the transformation the potion causes more ambiguous, leaving open the possibility of madness of a more clinical, and less supernatural, cause for his dual personalities. I also wondered if Stevenson had intended any parallels to alcohol in the transformative potion, whether he had himself put much importance in the philosophy or psychology behind his story or whether he was simply spinning a tale of terror.

In any case, the correspondence between the three friends, Utterson, Jekyll and Lanyon was ultimately the more interesting part of the book. The narrative was dull given the inadequacy of the plot to me but the personal letters opened much more personal worlds and put a much more human face on the story.

What spooked those of yesteryear may have changed, but putting a human face on a story seems to be eternal. I liked Jekyll’s tortured explanation for his plight and the rest worked well enough as backstory building up to it.

Mildly because it’s all a bit boring to me now and because the time for me to take religion personally has long come and gone. That this book made such a stir on these old favorite themes of mine was enough for me to want to read it someday, but on the other hand I thought it was trying to debunk beliefs I no longer cared much about.  So I never paid much attention to the hype and only bought it because it was one of the only English-language novels in the bookstore I had shopped at.

It turns out that it was very different than I had imagined. I had imagined a more antagonistic view of religion and didn’t know it also purported to be a thriller.  On the former I think it is for the better and as to the latter it reduced it to cheap Hollywood-esque fare for me.

I admired the very rich work with riddles, puzzles, twists and wordplay. I enjoyed the art and the history details, with all their embellishments, and I enjoyed the core concept of the Holy Grail and Mary Magdalene.

What ruined it for me was the modern setting for the conspiracy and the modern “fugitive movie” genre it reduced itself to. At no point in the plot could I stop questioning it’s idiocy and enjoy a decent suspension of disbelief. And as the plot unfolded it got progressively weaker.

I think the author might have known as much as well, he added backstory of the grandfather loving to play treasure hunts and riddles in what I see as pre-empting the readers’ notion that the novel’s plot is a childlike easter egg hunt trying to take itself seriously as an edge-of-your-seat thriller. But the twists he added at the end made it even weaker and the ending was anti-climatic and did more to simply tie down the ends of the plot than provide any climax.

The last novel I read, Michael Crichton’s State of Fear also couldn’t suspend disbelief for me in its own silly race around the globe. I wonder if my imagination has become old and brittle….

My brother and I were taught to read as toddlers using flashcards, and then the “Peter and Jane” series of Ladybird books. We never stopped and the next thing we both devoured was the “Picture Bible”, the Bible in comic book format. By five and six we were reading newspaper articles without difficulty and moving on to literature.

We weren’t allowed to watch TV so reading was our only entertainment other than one movie a week. I’d usually read three or four books in a week, but sometimes as much as five or six. We weren’t allowed to have most books but we’d smuggle them around and read them as fast as we could before they were confiscated from us.

Some of my fondest memories are our secret book club. Until adulthood there might be a grand total of a dozen books that we didn’t both read within a week. Every book he read I read. It was my our TV, our school and our lives. My brother and I would read everywhere. In the bathroom, before bed, even when walking down the street.

Then came computers. I got my first computer around the year 2000, and was instantly addicted to all the instant information available online. I taught myself various web development technologies, and began to study academic subjects with the same voracity I had once had for literature.

This enlightened me on all sorts of subjects from technology and science to political science and law. I spent a lot of my time reading things like Able2Know and Wikipedia and for a short time I was even following every known online newspaper on a daily or weekly basis. I began to contribute information and publish websites and my reading of literature, and all “hardcopy” books, virtually ceased. I’d read at least 2 books a week from 2 till 20 but might have read 3 books in the following 8 years, and only because someone send me those books and I would have been terribly rude not to have read them.

But I decided to start reading before bed again. I don’t allow TV or computers in the bedroom and thought reading would be a nice way to fall asleep again. So I started with James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I didn’t choose the book, it was left in my apartment by a friend and it was the only book I had around.

I happened by a bookstore and picked up a novel by one of my favorite contemporary authors from my childhood, Michael Crichton. And I sat down and read it overnight. It’s not that good of a book (State of Fear), but I simply missed reading that much and I’ve already bought four more books: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a collection of Aesop’s Fables (I remember them all so I won’t read it, and it’s for my brand-new book collection), Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code.

State of Fear felt dated, and the suspension of disbelief was difficult at times but I’ll have more to say about it later (and it’s two core concepts). Right now, I am just happy to be back in love with books, I’ve missed them!

In any case, Tuesday nights are their “Jam Session” nights and some locals were playing when we arrived. There was a drummer (whose drums were too loud) and a bassist (whose bass was too quiet), a pianist (who played clumsily) and a saxophonist (whose sax looked like a child’s sax and who had no lungs).

It was amateur hour but still fun, they were jamming away and their enthusiasm was fun to watch and the moment I wondered if they’d play my favorite (’Round Midnight) they started playing it. They butchered it, playing it too slowly, too soft and with bad timing on all parts but I was happy to hear someone play it live for the first time in ages and ages.

I sense an hour of ‘Round Midnight renditions coming on….

This has to be the worst typo I’ve seen on CNN.