There are no words that even begin to grasp the magnitude of fucktard proportions that is the road structure in this country. I’m beside myself in disbelief. We became an “independent” country in 1903, and even though we trail almost 300 years of more milleage than the big dog up north, somehow America got the upper hand and we got the shaft in many regards. If you get yourself a map of Panama you’ll see that we don’t have the most uniform, tidy shape in the history of geography, but we manage. In the past 6 years or so we’re becoming the “firsts” and “biggest” of a lot of things in Latin America, from the biggest, most modern mall (Multiplaza Pacific) to Donald Trump’s first Latin American Project (Trump Ocean Club Panama) and the first country with HDTV reception (which, by the way, kids… is a total waste of money at this point in the game. Let’s tally up: $3,000 bucks for a 1080p HDTV when all of your programming, except for sporting events IF you have the plan for it, hasn’t even caught up to the technology? So you have a top of the line TV where the quality of video is EXACTLY THE SAME as my $99 21″ TV. Nice going there, son. And the movies… an HDTV player is ringing up anywhere between $900 and $1,000 bucks. For what? “Van Helsing?” Spare me. Gimme Kubrick and a price drop in 3 years and THEN we’ll talk) and a bunch of other things that make up a pretty neat place to live, even though a lot of people are either too ignorant, too mean-spirited or both to realize. Or maybe it’s because the government keeps shafting the populace with a steaming rod with nails sticking out of it. Or perhaps it’s all three. Aww, shit, who the fuck cares.

It rains and the city is PARALYZED. At least we don’t have snow, which is a plus in that regard, I suppose… but the streets here are so badly laid out that there is no rational way to know where places are. Add to that the crucial weather factor and you’ve got a recipe for disaster. Saturday afternoons are HELL since many people work on saturdays until noon (including me) and then storm out to do whatever it is people do on Saturday afternoons, but it’s usually scorching hot, or raining cats and dogs or the clouds are just plain unfriendly; no matter what the weather condition is, it’s always going to be the worst possible weather ever raining down un hundreds of thousands of angry Latino drivers all across the city. Hell, we aren’t even that many. There’s roughly 1.5 million people living in Panama City, Panama. Out of those, I estamite a little over a third have cars and drive them around (duh) so it’s safe to say that, if you add all of the elements I’ve given you thus far together, you have a pretty fucked up situation. Now, let me add the seasoning to this mix…

Let me illustrate just how spaghetti-ed up the roads are in Panama. This is not a literal illustration, but it’s pretty close. Take a look at the picture below; this represents the road infrastructure in, say, the States or Argentina or wherever:

Not bad, right? Everybody’s cool and collected and the traffic’s great and nice, if someone tells you to go to block 233, apartment such-n-such you’ll find it and there’s not a worry in the world. You can be confident you’ll find the place you’re looking for, no matter what. Alright, now, this is an illustration of how roads are in Panama:

So now you’re in your car inside the skull with the pavement road for a tongue. You squeeze your way down it’s throat, not knowing where to go until you hit the stomach and for once you feel some space and a sense of security… only to be shoved into the intestines where it’s tighter, hotter and stinkier and you don’t really know where you’re going but you do know you’re going somewhere until you see a light and get shot out through the ass and go head-first to your destination. THAT’S driving in Panama. It’s been widely said in all of my years living here that if you know how to drive in Panama, you’ll be an expert at driving in any other place in the world… and shit, I’m inclined to believe that statement. We don’t have what you mortals call “blocks.” Yours and our concepts of the term differ. Y’see, for you foreigners a block is a block, with a predetermined milleage between them and in giving directions getting to a destination is as easy as pie. I don’t know how to illustrate the way we have to give out directions, but even though you won’t know half the places i’ll be talking about coming up next, I’ll try to illustrate my point. To get to my office building in Avenida Balboa coming from my home in Betania (quite easily from one corner of the city to the other) I have to go down the Camino Real, hit the Vía Transístimica (one of the main arteries of the city), go all the way down but before I hit the hospital I have to take a right and drive up the loop that sends me off to the bridge that crosses over the Transístmica; got to go down that road dodging these fuckers as they blaze down the swiss cheese-like roads from all the cracks, holes and the like, get into Vía España (another main artery) by taking a right, go down that road and cross all of the lanes so I can get in the line that allows me to turn a left, go down that road, dodge cabs, more of these and other people eager to go to their destinations, cross another stoplight, keep going all the way to Avenida Balboa (the third main artery in this journey) take a right and hop in there so I can go up until I see my building, where I have to get into the side road with no name. All of this in under 20 minutes.

So, the roads are shit, the drivers are anything BUT corteous and whenever it rains or whenever there’s a car crash or repairs on the road the traffic jam generated is something out of this world. Still, we do what all other countries do in spite of our shortcomings in city planning: we have take-out food (I have the utmost respect for those guys; they ride in bikes through this motor hell with my food), crazy taxi cabs and public transportation as I talked about just now, underground racing and of course, racers and ricers. For some reason people believe it’s actually a good idea to lower their modified cars, with NOS and gauges and mushrooms and other stuff they barely use since they’re on traffic jams and doing twists and turns more than half the time (oh, and these are their all-around cars. They take these to go to work, do groceries, go to clubs, babysit…), put on crazy bulldozer front bumpers and airplane spoilers. Hell, they’re cool to look at, but I personally find it more amusing seeing a lowered modded car going through a rocky road full of holes and coming out a steep exit rather than seeing them race. The only things I do see worth getting are paint jobs and backfire, though. the latter is pointless and useless, but I tried it once with El Bear’s car and that was absolutely awesome. We were both hammered at the time, but I don’t think it would’ve changed the greatness of it. To add insult to injury, getting a driver’s license here is ridiculously easy…

If you’re Panamanian (I think they even hand out driver’s permits to foreigners now but I’m not sure) just go to the Transit Authority early in the morning and stand outside. Seriously, just stand outside. In less than 5 minutes you’ll have a full list of people offering you to take you past the red tape and get you a license for anywhere between $40 and $100. And these are the real deal… with them you don’t have to do the written test nor the actual driving test, no lectures, nothing… they just put you on the line to get your picture taken and that’s that; a smile, a fingerprint an 30 minutes later, you’re a certified driver. It sure beats doing it the old fashioned way, busting your ass studying for an exam that asks you shit you’ll never have to think about again, do the driver’s test with your car, the one you went over there with and aren’t licensed to drive yet only to hear an ironic speech about how you’re supposed to be corteous on the road and what not and THEN get your prints and picture taken. I got out of there at 4 in the afternoon! Yet some people have licenses yet they don’t know how to drive. Oh, sweet and silly Panama…

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