Moving House

After half a year in a one bedroom flat with a miniscule balcony, we moved to a real house with three bedrooms and a back and front garden. All for the same price! So we can now enjoy our breakfast on the verandah in front, while hummingbirds and woodpeckers pass by (the back yard only provides a view of the free range chicken breeding project of our neighbours).

See our photos in the yahoo album:
http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/loesroos/album?.dir=/4bdbre2&.src=ph&.tok=phg4KuGB032gpUaL

On our verandah we are surrounded by all the trees we have grown in the last couple of months (moving those was the most time consuming part of the whole moving process). We have now over a hundred saplings, such as Panama trees, Stinking Toes, Monkey combs, Monkey Condoms, Cacao, Tamarind, Mahogany, Sand Box Tree, Soursop, ‘Melina’, ‘Corotu’ ‘Vaino’ ‘Uvito’ ‘Guabo’ and many others. Seeds germinate almost daily because we have sown hundreds during the last couple of months. Some grow real fast, the Stinking Toes are 50 cm high, while others take their sweet time. The monkey condoms were sown way before the stinking toes, but the highest barely reaches 10 cm.

Our kayaks are now lying next to the house, rather than in the living room. The latter is now three times bigger while we have far less items to put there. So when you talk loudly, you hear an echo. The advantage is that the statue we bought in Mozambique can be displayed to its full advantage. And, by coincidence, the pink in our Mugapela painting matches the pale pink walls.

Yes, not only the house on the property in Malena has pink walls, our living room in Santiago has the same colour. Apparently pink is a very popular colour among home decorators in Panama. We politely remarked that in our country pink walls are mostly associated with little girls’ bedrooms and got the owner to repaint some walls in white.

One cannot accuse the majority of Panamanians of good taste when it comes to home decoration or art. Kitsch is definitely the norm: the more frilly bits and candy colours, the better it is. Paintings of European landscapes in the romantic style, but without any sense of perspective are very popular for decoration, as are biblically inspired scenes, also without perspective and featuring people with decidedly vacant faces. The final alternative for cheap decoration is Technicolor pictures of Hong Kong, Dubai and other examples of modern ‘power architecture’. Luckily two of the two rooms have deep, dark cupboards where we have stored these gems to protect them from the harmful rays of the sun.