A Retrospective on Living in a House in Coronado, Panama

I lived in a large house in Coronado, Panama for exactly 168 days. Give or take 10 days or so. This is a blog post with my thoughts on that experience.

The first thing you have to understand where and what Coronado is. I promise it plays a part in the story. The where part is easy. I lived about an hour and forty minute drive from Panama City (the one with the canal). The what is a bit more complicated. Coronado is a gated community… by gated, I mean it has one road in or out with a comically inept guard squad blocking your ingress. Egress at will! Don’t get me wrong, these guys are great… at being humans. Not guarding against criminals or the such.

Our favorite guard was Epiphanio. My wife brought them cakes and sweet things to eat and drink. They appreciated it greatly. It was very scary to live there due to the crime.

I digress. Coronado is a beach town known as a weekenders paradise or a place where old white people go to die. There is also a huge Jewish community. The residents also refuse to connect their roads to the roads of nearby communities, because they don’t want to be associated with those folks. Such is life.

Something about this place never sat right with me. Maybe it was the judgy, entitled old crusty folks eating at Picasso’s every night. Maybe it was the overpriced food. Maybe it was the roads that made you feel like you were driving the Baja 500 daily. Maybe it was a good combination of those, with a sprinkling of fear of B & E’s.

Whatever the case, we never really vibed with the place, and generally felt pretty isolated. We lived pretty far from most of our friends, and it was during a pretty tough time in our early transition to life in Panama.

Also, it was really fucking hot. Our house was about a 10-minute walk to the beach. That meant we did not get a beautiful ocean breeze, we got oppressive heat. The upside of this, though, is that we acclimated quickly. Now I kinda feel like Iron Man when it’s hot outside. Though, perhaps that’s not a great analogy; unless Tony Stark outfitted his suit with some sort of air conditioning system. I’m sure he had to have a heating system, as flying up into the atmosphere is incredibly cold.

Again, I digress. I know it feels like I’m really ragging on this place. Believe me, I’m holding back a ton because I realize now that I should have broken this into several posts. There were days and days without water (ha!), pool issues, sketchy yard guys, an attempted break-in, bugs and critters that you wouldn’t believe (one of my nightly chores was to throw toads over the fence to avoid our dogs biting them and becoming dog carcasses), and so much more.

I consider myself a hopeful optimist, though. That means that one day, I hope to be an optimist. Looking at it through this lens then, it was a typical Panameño home with typical idiosyncrasies related to living in a second-world country.

Listen: we’re not in Kansas anymore. More than you know, I understand that.

If I were the kind of optimist who liked to make a pro’s and con’s list, it would look something like this:

If I could, I would rate it a 6/10. Rating the house is impossible, though, because it possessed no address. Such is life.