PANAMA

Going to Stores in Spanish

FROM THE TRAVEL DIARY OF KILO FOXTROT

The streets are named after days. On Cinco de Mayo there are a lot of stores and a lot of them sell cell phones. We went to four of those. Josh needed a new SIM card. We were finally successful at the cell phone counter of a party decoration warehouse. I carried with me from New York to San Jose to San Francisco to Las Vegas to Palenque a fancy new phone his mom mailed to my workplace for me to bring to him. I watched security footage in my work building management office in impatient realtime the day between when the tracking said it was delivered, and when it arrived, the day before I left. Also in that box were his used clothes.

The stores are deep booths with a door for a whole front wall and open to the street where carts are stores and pedicures are chairs and tables. The Global South has a lot more different kinds of phones.

Josh rudely turned and stomped away from the pretty girl in Phone Store Two because she didn't have the tool to open up the phone for you and everything was hazy that night except her eyes fully surprised and partially betraying no customer ever offended her maybe. A stranger to my outside face I hoped it was an apology before running after him wondering whether she might in my defense imagine I just then arrived in the city, half-dead since the previous evening, with no idea what was going on, at all.