In the morning, we walked across to the fish market, which I had read was the place to have lunch in the city. It was a short walk over very large but quiet roads along the glittering Pacific. The market itself – the wholesale market was being washed down, but along the front was a row of small food stands all selling ceviche and more or less the same preparations of fish. As we approached, the waiters brandishing menus gathered and I felt like an antelope on the savanna. I don’t at all like this swarming action, but it seems to be how things are done in the tourist parts of town. We fought through the swarm and went into the consumer bit of the market where we admired the crayfish and other seafoods. One lobster made a run for it, leaping off a weighing scale and burying itself within a pile of dead lobsters, rather sad.
Outside there was a food stand set a little apart from the others and will a small collection of people already there, and unwilling to battle the touts again, we decided to eat here. The food was disappointing: a fairly whatever ceviche and a fried fish with coconut rice (more bean than coconut, but I daresay that it what it is). The only good thing about our meal was that the table next to us had quite a terrifying couple whom I enjoyed watching. The man was covered in tattoos and looked like he had his full complement of switchblades, while the woman was surgically enhanced in multiple ways: breasts, nose and lips at least were the ones that I could identify. The lip filler was particularly grotesque to me — it was the Kim Kardashian style sausage lip and as she was eating and talking I watched in horrified fascination as the lips seemed barely to move, just waggle up and down as though there were two fat slugs lying across her face.
Our next planned stop was the modern art museum. Getting there turned out to be fairly complicated and took us through a shockingly poor part of the city compared to Casco where we are staying. It was far poorer even than some of the hillside barrios in Medellin. I suspect Panama is a place of quite dramatic inequality, and indeed later, at night, we passed what appeared to be a society wedding in a Casco church, with gigantic cars dropping off extremely glamorous women and men. Well, it is so in Pakistan as well, maybe more so. But easier to see in another country than in one’s own.
These very poor and slightly dangerous feeling streets turned into a really lively and enjoyable main road. Fully pedestrianised (unlike Casco), a wide shopping street with vendors selling toothpaste, bin bags and rabbits, and hundreds of people just doing their own thing, shopping on a weekend afternoon, but it was a wide enough street that it was not oppressive. There were many Guna women there in traditional attire: beads wrapped around their calves in coloured patterns, a vivid black-and-other-colour sarong, an appliqued panel around the waist, a top above that, and finally a bright headscarf. Very attractive and I would quite like to buy one of those panels. After the end of the shopping street we turned towards a truly derelict part of town, reeking of urine and covered in filthy water, with a wall that I dubbed the Wall of Honduran Liberation until I saw there were many other kinds of political graffiti including the ones against femicide that were all over Mexico as well.
Beyond this there was a huge motorway with a blue pedestrian bridge that seemed unnecessarily long instead of a simple up down and across. Then we arrived at the museum, past rows of mango trees with dropped fruit covered in millions of flies, to find it was shut. So back we went, all the way, past the wall and the piss and the blue bridge, up the shopping street again. It did make me think how many of these shopping streets I’ve seen over the years, and how they change depending on the market. The Oxford Streets with their repeated international brands, the East Asian ones choked with people and bright white, clean shops filled with women’s clothes for tourists and middle income shoppers, and these ones aimed at the poor.
Panama is at least three cities: Casco, the emerging tourist mecca, with its government buildings and fancy restaurants, the rat-filled streets that we walked through, and in the distance, across the bay, the skyscraper city, imposing and a little grey, like Bladerunner.