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Home Countries Panama

At Home In Casco Viejo

Kathleen Peddicord by Kathleen Peddicord
Aug 16, 2009
in Panama, Retirement/Living
0
You have to look beyond any prejudices to find the real beauty of this place. One that is always reinventing itself for better. Expat Life In Casco Viejo Panama can be a really candid experience.
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At Home In Casco Viejo

It wasn’t an international move. Rather, we were relocating simply from one end of Panama City to the other. Still, we’ve been through moves in developing world countries before. We prepared ourselves for the worst.

We’d engaged the moving company to come the day before to pack our household contents in their entirety, so, Wednesday morning, we walked out the door and headed for the office hoping for the best but, as I said, fully expecting some less optimal outcome.

Wednesday night, Lief returned home before I did. He called to report, “There’s not a fork, not a glass that’s not been wrapped and put into a carton. And every stick of furniture is covered with plastic. They left the mattresses unwrapped and the television and DVD player connected. We’ll need to go out for dinner. Then we can come back home and sit on the floor to watch a movie, I guess.”

Thursday morning, at the appointed hour, five young and energetic Panamanians, under the direction of a very on-the-ball lady manager, burst into the apartment and set about loading their moving truck with our stuff. Across town, in Casco Viejo, the crew navigated our narrow lane, parked their truck, then off-loaded it just as energetically and cheerfully as they’d filled it up several hours earlier.

Several pieces couldn’t be fit up the winding first-floor staircase. Our guys didn’t skip a beat. They carried the guest room bed, the leather couch, and the antique armoire back out on to the street. Then, one by one, they hoisted each piece of furniture by rope from the sidewalk up over the first-floor balcony. Nine-year-old Jackson watched with delight.

Just as the skies opened and the rain came pouring down, the last cardboard box was carried inside. By now, it was dark. Our guys had been hauling and toting since 8:30 a.m., but, again, cheerfully, with no encouragement, they began unwrapping the plastic from around all the furniture, then standing by for instructions from me as to where to place each piece in each room.

It was nearly 9 p.m. when they finished. We’ve spent the couple of days since unpacking boxes (which the movers will return tomorrow morning to collect) and getting to know our new neighborhood.

Living next-door is an American from Arizona who’s been in Casco Viejo for a year and who is preparing for the opening of his new microbrewery just around the corner. Two blocks away is a friendly, family-run restaurant that offers an Executive Lunch including salad, homemade bread, ceviche, an entrée of chicken, pork, or fish, and dessert for US$8.50.

On the corner of our street is the 16th-century La Merced church, where, this morning, the faithful gathered at 7, 9, and again at 11 to sing and celebrate. Two blocks away is the main Casco Viejo square, Plaza Cathedral, with another beautiful old church and a couple of museums, including the Panama Canal Museum.

On our small street, every building but one has been carefully restored. The one remaining renovation project is well under way. I watched the workmen exposing the interior stone and brick walls of the four-story structure from our balcony yesterday morning.

Behind us, new apartments and a swimming pool are being erected.

And all around, the good people of Casco Viejo are enjoying life in this World Heritage Site enclave with its brick-paved streets, centuries-old French- and Spanish-colonial structures, plazas, squares, and gardens. We couldn’t be happier to join them.

Kathleen Peddicord

 

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Kathleen Peddicord

Kathleen Peddicord

Kathleen Peddicord has covered the live, retire, and do business overseas beat for more than 30 years and is considered the world's foremost authority on these subjects. She has traveled to more than 75 countries, invested in real estate in 21, established businesses in 7, renovated historic properties in 6, and educated her children in 4.

Kathleen has moved children, staff, enterprises, household goods, and pets across three continents, from the East Coast of the United States to Waterford, Ireland... then to Paris, France... next to Panama City, where she has based her Live and Invest Overseas business. Most recently, Kathleen and her husband Lief Simon are dividing their time between Panama and Paris.

Kathleen was a partner with Agora Publishing’s International Living group for 23 years. In that capacity, she opened her first office overseas, in Waterford, Ireland, where she managed a staff of up to 30 employees for more than 10 years. Kathleen also opened, staffed, and operated International Living publishing and real estate marketing offices in Panama City, Panama; Granada, Nicaragua; Roatan, Honduras; San Miguel de Allende, Mexico; Quito, Ecuador; and Paris, France.

Kathleen moved on from her role with Agora in 2007 and launched her Live and Invest Overseas group in 2008. In the years since, she has built Live and Invest Overseas into a successful, recognized, and respected multi-million-dollar business that employs a staff of 35 in Panama City and dozens of writers and other resources around the world.

Kathleen has been quoted by The New York Times, Money magazine, MSNBC, Yahoo Finance, the AARP, and beyond. She has appeared often on radio and television (including Bloomberg and CNBC) and speaks regularly on topics to do with living, retiring, investing, and doing business around the world.

In addition to her own daily e-letter, the Overseas Opportunity Letter, with a circulation of more than 300,000 readers, Kathleen writes regularly for U.S. News & World Report and Forbes.

Her newest book, "How to Retire Overseas: Everything You Need to Know to Live Well (for Less) Abroad," published by Penguin Random House, is the culmination of decades of personal experience living and investing around the world.

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