The first order of business in Panama, was to learn Spanish. The interns in Panama were booked to have a month of intensive (30 hrs/week) Spanish lessons at the Universidad Santa Maria la Antigua (USMA). It's the second largest university in Panama, next to the University of Panama.
So here we were, three white women, one white guy, and one "chino" (that's me by the way) thrown into the Panamanian school system. We were ready for them, but they were clearly not ready for us Canadians.
Our teacher was signed up at the last minute because no one else was interested in the job. His wife was expecting a child that month, so it probably wasn't a good idea for him to have taken that position. He was a busy man, he had to go home constantly between classes to care for his pregnant wife. We lost a lot of class time because of this, and some of us were pretty angry about that. Not angry at him, angry at the way the school mishandled the whole situation. Anyway, we were very happy when the baby was born. We were invited to his house one day to see his baby girl and to do some studying. It was nice, I didn't get a cigar though :(.
School was fun for me. There were only five of us in the class. There was lots of laughing, and learning too; but more laughing, I think. We were sort of in our own little world at school. We didn't really get a chance to mingle with the other Panamanian students. That was too bad, because there were many very looking girls around - I mean a lot. One day, in the cafeteria, I noticed how many good-looking girls there were, just in that room. I would have considered going out with any of them. The ratio of good-looking girls to "regular-looking" girls was suprisingly high. This holds true especially in the clubs and the bars.
Oh yeah, I saved the best part about school for last. We were assigned an assistant for our classes. And boy, was she hot. (Before you jump to any conclusions, my definition of "hot" is probably different than anybody else's, so ask if you want to know). Sometimes when some of the other students were sick or couldn't make it to school, I had one on one lessons with her. It was cool. That's all I'm gonna say about that.
School was OK, not very hard. With the days my teacher missed out because of his baby and the five days I missed out because I was sick (that's a whole different story, don't tell mom), I really didn't get as much out of school as I wanted. As I attended my last classes at USMA, I felt sad. I knew that I would have to start work and have responsibilities and stuff. The transition from school life to work life was something I wanted to put off for as long as possible. It was time to face the real world - which turned out to be pretty good, as you will see.
