The trip over was slow: I drove extra slow in order not to have police trouble. And most of the other people on the road were driving very slowly, too. The whole highway moved along at about 45mph 60km. People were in the Carnival spirit and most people were very polite to one another. People nodded knowingly from the windows of their cars, others waved, some didn’t look at all.

We reached Santa Librada and the place was almost empty: most of the families had left the city and were headed into the interior to see their extended families, grandparents and birthplaces – the place was empty, you could literally hear a pin drop a block away. Normally, the place was disco biscuits and salsa groove neighborhood – I was dumbfounded by the silence.

What was interesting to me was the fact that when I lived in the interior of Panama, I was able to watch as people from city towns like Santa Librada arrived to the deep countryside from the city during holidays like Carnival. Always happy, always smiling wide with stories and always ready to drink too much Chi-cha and seco. Chic-cha is corn alcohol. The women in the countryside normally make it. In the old days women chewed the corn and then spat it out and then cooked the paste and then later fermented it. I guess you could say it sealed the union between woman and man. I love good Chi-cha but only in the deep countryside. Today, the women run the corn through an old coffee grinder that you turn with a big handle. The grinder is braced on top a piece of wood that is placed outside or sometimes inside the kitchen.  After the grinding of the corn in the coffee grinder, a small fire close to the ground is lit and three stones are put together in the fire so as to be able to place a large pot filled with the Chi-cha paste over the fire that will heat the Chi-cha and prepare it for fermentation. After the Chi-cha is cooked, it is put into large plastic tanks and drank after a day or two or three of fermentation. The taste is good and the drunk is complete bullocks; you end up completely out of your tree: everyone screams, throws their arms into the air, dances, howls at the moon and then passes out in the middle-of-the-road or in some chicken shit or a pine forest.

Rosi’s house was locked and we parked the car a short distance from the house. Houses were built all over the surrounding green hills. The air was fresh and the view wonderful – to downtown Panama City and the Pacific Ocean. She gathered her stuff and we headed back to the house. It was a 20-minute ride back and traffic was light and people were outside their houses splashing each other with water.

By late in the afternoon I got hold of the idea that we should leave the comforts of our house and head over to the mobile fun park: old rides that had probably been outlawed in the States because they were unsafe: it gave the fright of the rides a greater urgency. I hadn’t been in a fun ride atmosphere since my teens on Wildwood Crest, New Jersey, so I felt more confident than I should have about my fears. We bought our tickets at the entrance. The salesperson that sold me the entrance ticket was encased in a small circus style booth – like a mobile latrine with chicken wire mesh. She sat far back in the shadows of the booth with the late day sun across our faces, I only saw her white teeth. There were two entrances: one for men; the other for women. No one was entering on the male side so I entered before my female companions. They entered about 10 minutes after me. The fairgrounds were alive: people walked by with baby strollers and balloons. The rides were laid out across a barren grass field that was golden and green in color. We went first to a ride called “Musicfest”: German I thought to myself. The ride was like a wave. You sat in a car attached to a loose universal joint that swung when the speed of the ride, which was circular and on which the cars we sat in swung dangerously sideways, increased. Think of a fast-moving merry-go-round, but with a undulated motion. Well, the Bloody Mary’s went around and around and the high-speed circular motion sent my blood rushing through my head, so that I felt sick, dizzy and energized.  When the ride stopped and we went in reverse, the sickness quality of the experience was accentuated – now my eyeballs felt as though they were coming out of the front of my head rather than up into my brain. We got off and the next ride we went on was the traditional roller coaster. As a child a never liked roller coasters and thought they were dangerous, not safe, and something people should avoid like a bee sting. We decided to go and I watched carefully as to who was running the show.

They looked like Italians and the assistants were not Panamanians but rather Nicaraguans and Costa Ricans and El Salvadorians. We entered the roller coaster car and I was confident even with a 6:00pm hangover and with too many margaritas that had turned my mouth into the shape of a U, that the roller coater was just what I needed. The first drop didn’t look bad and I was confident of an easy time. We climbed the first hill; the sound of the chain kicking in was loud with that funny click, click, click sound as though the chain will miss and you will soon find yourself falling straight backwards. At the top of the first hill,  I was scared and my 12-year-old companion/daughter screamed and I screamed with a real fear and then thought I might be too heavy for the speed of the small car and the mobile roller coaster. Down we went and I closed my eyes only feeling the crazy movements of the roller coaster rather than seeing them.

There were other rides and we stayed until about 7:00 and then we headed back to the house. When we returned to the house there were friends around. I had ordered some videos for Carnival: Big Blue, Baron Muchassen, Amadeus, Rosy Music Live and Once upon A time In The West, Legend and One From The Heart – we didn’t watch the videos, they just played under the music and conversation. The evening ended early with the majority of the people heading off to the bus station where they caught a mid-night bus to the small town of Santiago 3 hours drive into the interior of Panama. They told me later they arrived at four in the morning and woke up their relatives at 4:30am and then they began to drink by 5:30 and that is the kind of experience that you can have during Carnival in Panama. Saturday night I went to bed after driving people to the bus station. On Sunday when I woke up I headed out to the pool. I normally swim at Balboa pool in Panama. The pool is old, say, from the 1930s. The lockers are white with old style showers and old style skylights; the kind you find on the top floor of old English row houses. The swim felt good but by the time I finished and bought groceries I was thinking this has gone on long enough and that I needed a drink. And a Margarita was on my mind. We invited over Roger, the founder of escape artist and he stopped by to have a drink and a laugh. I drank too much too soon and was making overtly smiley faces to everyone in the room. But I thought to myself what the hell, it’s Carnival and this is what I want to do.

On Monday of Carnival our old friend Ron Keith from Nashville flew in. Ron is a photographer and also a greater builder: his home on Isla Grande is up for sale as he plans to build another house closer to the San Blas Islands. It was very good to see Ron; it had been too long.

We headed off to Chinatown for food and drinks. Chinatown in Panama is also a free-zone; there are a number of Chinese companies that import/export out of Chinatown, though Chinatown itself is very small. The Chinese first came to Panama during the building of the Trans-American railroad in the late 1840s and early 1850s. Most came and went crazy and died of fever. The Chinatown of today is located where the old railway ended on the Pacific side of Panama. In the 1850s, Chinatown was made up of small shops and opium dens: opium was legal and most opium arrived to Panama from San Francisco, California. Some Chinese stayed on in Panama, though many left – the Chinese that stayed opened small shops in Panama City and they became an important part of the trading economy of Panama which would only become more important after the building of the Panama Canal.

As a funny side note, while I was talking to people about Chinatown and gathering information, a friend told me a funny story: When the Archduke Maximilian decided to go to Mexico in 1862 to take over the Mexican throne with French support, Panamanians wanted him to come to Panama instead of Mexico: he should of come to Panama. Maximilian had been the Austrian Governor of Lombardy – the area of Italy that Venice is located in. His wife Charlotte was Saxe-Coburg – Belgian royalty. Maximilian was the brother of Emperor Franz Joseph. The French, the British and the Spanish invaded Mexico in 1861 in order to collect a debt that was owned to them by the Mexican government. This European intervention in Mexico was only able to happen because the U.S. at the time was involved its own Civil War. The British and Spanish pulled out after a short year in Mexico; only the French stayed, sending 30,000 additional troops in 1862 to Mexico to sure up Maximilian: I have always thought that this European adventure in Mexico was a sign of the kinds of interventions we would see in the modern period: interventions without any clear political objectives and with little hope of clear victory.  After the U.S. fought its Civil War and stability was returned to the U.S, the French effort in Mexico was abandoned by Naploeon the III by 1866: Maximilian was shot down in 1867 in Mexico - but French blood has run through the Mexicans since. This massacre of Maximilian would never have happened in Panama where he would have rotted away in a sexual and chemical bliss.

The last night of Carnival R.M.Koster, the writer,  came by for a drink. We drank Bells Scotch which I hadn’t had in years: I forgot what it could do to you. All I remember was some talk about the National Book Award, Panamanian politics, endnotes and then a cloud, a cloud like a tornado cloud rose up in the middle of the table and everyone left and I was on the phone talking to a student I didn’t really know very well that wanted to come over for a drink; he never did.