Oh. David. Hello. Again.

What does the word “plan” mean to you? What sort of feeling does it give you? If you make a plan, do you expect it to happen? Are you annoyed or disappointed if it doesn’t? Do you travel?

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.

Hard to photograph a closet, but can you get the idea?

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…