The City and The City.

I arrived in Panama City last night, and I eventually found myself in a seedy part of town at a place called Club Miami in the company of four very drunk and coked out guys I had met at a previous bar. Club Miami is a strip club, of sorts. The doorman looked at me rather oddly as I made my way inside. The dancing itself had nothing on the clubs in Portland: the girls half-heartedly strutted across the stage at random intervals, and there was almost no pole work to speak of. The men were not tipping. At one point, I followed the signs that said ¨banos¨, only to find a men´s room at the end of the hall, but no women´s. A bouncer took pity on my confusion and led me to the stripper´s dressing room, where I peed in a stall-less toilet next to a naked woman talking on a cell phone. It was obvious that women were not expected as customers.

The reason for all this, of course, was that this was not an establishment where one goes to watch naked ladies dance, except to examine the goods before paying $100, picking the girl you like, and taking her to one of the rooms in back. I was in a whorehouse.

Now, I wasn´t surprised to be there as the guys had been pretty explicit about what sort of place we were going to. If anything, I was a little surprised at how ordinary it seemed. Some of the women were good looking; most were average, a little on the chubby side. I didn´t look at their faces very closely- I was shy about making eye contact. I watched a parade of butts and stomachs and tits. They all wore white, an ironic touch. The guys I was with greeted the doorman and DJ with familiarity as the bouncer informed us that the cocaine would be arriving in half an hour. One of the guys said he was writing a guide called ¨The Not So Lonely Planet¨.

I had a few drinks and then took a cab home and went to bed. Not a very exciting story in the end. I was simply curious to see what a Central American brothel was like, and I was a bit disappointed.

In the daylight, however, I find the city utterly charming. I´m staying in the Casco Viejo district- an old neighborhood filled with crumbling colonial buildings. Walking north from here through the market (filled with the requisite vegetables, junk, piles of trash, stray dogs, half-naked children, and delicious delicious bags of sliced mango) you emerge on a main street closed to cars and lined with cheap shops. I bought a new outfit today for $10. Looking across the bay you can see downtown and the financial district, a forest of modern skyscrapers reminiscent, as many have said, of Miami. Fernando, my cabbie from the bus station yesterday, was probably the nicest person I´ve met on this trip. There are $0.50 beers in the bar below my hostel. So all in all, I adore this city. Although I do think I might try to find some classier nightlife tonight.