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2 Retire In Panama? NEWSLETTER Volume 3 October 12, 2020 The economy of Panama continues to open... ...and I continue to try to make the newsletter better for all of our subscribers. I had a good friend help me with the logistics of this and he tells me that it should work now as I envisioned. There are almost 800 subscribers and judging by my review of the subscriber list, some of them are not real. Our terms and conditions to subscribe only asks for an e-mail address and first name. We do not store any other information on our subscribers. Please, accept my apology if you did not want or expect to receive our blog and/or newsletter by e-mail. You can scroll to the bottom and unsubscribe. As of today, almost the entire country is open Monday through Saturday from 5am to 11pm, with the exception of the beaches. The Sunday full quarantine and the beach closure will remain in effect until further notice. There are a few areas that remain under partial shutdown. The Sunday quarantine creates a problem for the reopening of churches. Our church has been having services on Friday in preparation for the eventual Sunday opening. We have continued to have virtual services on Sunday with people joining in from over 40 counties worldwide. Our pastor hopes to continue virtual church once Sunday services resume. Karyn Saunders has been posting reports daily which she translates from the government MINSA reports. She will be winding them down with the nearly entire reopening of the country. For those of you interested in the recent stats for COVID in Panama, here is the October 8, 2020 update: 118,054 total cases +754 new, 2463 total deaths +15 new, 117 ICU, 742 hospitalized, 21,200 active, 94,391 recovered +781 new, 2.1% death rate. 526,418 total tests, +5836 new, 12,304/100,000, 12.9% positive rate. Decree #1142 & #1143 will include the following as of October 12th: 1. Opening of all hotels, motels, and hostels. Pools at 25% occupancy. 2. Tourist activities, non-essential transportation, creative industries including cultural, academic, music, art, and dance 3. Cinemas, theatres and galleries will be able to open with 50% occupancy. 4. Casinos and lotteries will open. All activities will operate every day except for the curfew hours and in the areas where Ministerio de Salud have established full quarantine days (super ambiguous as to what this means and the provinces it is referring). With the reopening of restaurants... ...we have been excited to return to some of our favorite places and discovered at least one new one. One fonda near our home called Fonda Extraterrestre is operated by a Cordon Bleu trained chef and offers outstanding cuisine at very reasonable prices. He is only open for lunch and prepares a limited amount of food daily. Get there early while there are the most options. Jen had lasagna (she got the last one) and I had a chopped sirloin grilled with vegetables and served with rice and beans. We left full and with a loaf of bread which we watched him bake in the wood fired oven on the patio dining area. Our bill including a generous tip was $20. Gold Coast Brewery is a new pub offering in Coronodo. It officially opened during the pandemic offering take-out and delivery only. We have tried to support this restaurant occasionally by picking up food and taking advantage of the delivery service. The service and food have been outstanding. Wednesday we dropped in for an in-person experience. They are offering some local microbrews, but as of now are not offering any of their own beers. The pub food is crazy good, and we enjoyed chicken wings (it was wing Wednesday) and gourmet onion rings. If you are in the area, it is a place not to be missed. Secundo Piso is the fine dining establishment linked to our country club. In my opinion it has the best food and best prices in Coronodo. It is opened to the public on weekends by reservation only. We celebrated our anniversary there on Saturday night. The pool bar is open with happy hour on Saturday, so we enjoyed a two for one cocktail downstairs before heading up to the dining room. There was nice entertainment in the dining room. On Tuesday... ...Jen and I had a delightful adventure. We had a tour of Buenaventura. This was one of the places that we had considered when we were looking for our forever home in Panama. Unfortunately, we never took the opportunity to see it before our visit on Tuesday. We were invited by the leadership of their website and newsletter which is called Panama Living. They are interested in my book and interviewed me for their newsletter. I am excited for a possible future collaboration. Check out their website Panama Living. I will be publishing a blog post in the near future with pictures and details of our experience at Buenaventura. I remain committed… …to keeping this newsletter under 2 pages and sharing good information. It would benefit the whole readership to have feedback. Please reply with any questions or suggestions for next week.
Blessings from paradise, Greg To change your subscription, click here. |
