Nothing is Easy in Paradise

Speaking Spanish would really help!

I head down to David to pick up a blank form to renew my license plates and transfer the licensing place from Panama City to Boquete.  I have expert help from friends so this should be easy.

That is the kiss of death.

We get to the place and it looks like a car repair facility.  We request, in broken Spanish, the blank  form and the problems start.  After several attempts at communication, we give up.

I call a friend who speaks Spanish and she translates for us to no avail.  We simply are not getting anywhere.

Finally, we get the expert on the phone who is fluent in Spanish and actually knows what we need.  The problem gets solved.  We need an inspection and the form filled out, not simply a blank form.

This is typical of; one, not having enough background to understand the instructions; two, the language problem; three, the real curse, advise from various people.

This brings me to one of the biggest stumbling blocks...advise.

If advise is requested from several people...about any simple thing like how is your Internet service...you will get a bewildering array of answers that are mutually exclusive.  None of them are remotely similar.

Making you think you are now living in crazy land!  

What makes it even more baffling is the inconsistency in Panama.  Any process changes incessantly.  Or, if you try to do the same thing at different times of the same day, the same bureaucrat will give you different information.

This is the land of fluidity.

And, this renders advise worthless, worthless, worthless.

It even gets logarithmically divergent when you consult an attorney or accountant.

Here is a little example that has cropped up in the last week.

One of the big benefits for pensionados (like us retired people) is no property taxes for 20 years on your house.  This is a big deal.  This requires pulling the building permit before July 1, 2009.  So the deadline is looming over us and important.  No problem...our house is almost finished.

Because our builder has so much smoke and mirrors and double talk, we are not certain that he has pulled the building permit for our friend's house, which is also almost finished.  (We are under the impression that this has been done on our house because I have an actual building permit in my possession.  This, you would think, would reassure you that all is good.)

But nooooooo!!!!!!

My friends email their building permit to our attorney and she now wants to see it and massage it and pull it apart, etc. to see if it actually is a good permit.

For God's sake!  Is nothing simple here?  It's only a building permit!

This is how it goes.  One upset after another.  Most of them self inflicted, you guessed it, by ASKING FOR ADVISE.

Rule Number 1 in Panama: NEVER ASKED ADVISE UNLESS YOU WANT TO HAVE A REALLY BAD TIME!!!

Ah, the dilemma:  you have to ask advise in a strange land.

Thus, many really bad times!

It is a damn good thing that I love it here.