Day 2

Hi Friends,

Its Day 2 but it feels like we have been here for months! We've still been traveling to our home destination. We will go there tomorrow by bus. Panama has an interesting and different culture but its also very similar to where we're from.

Our trip has gone pretty smoothly...except the start. It was about 9 hours before we needed to leave to the airport that I realized I left my passport in Statesboro...and we were 7 hours away in West Palm, Florida! Thankfully my grandmother brought it to Jacksonville so I could drive back in the nick of time, and thankfully Tyler's mom was able to find the passport!! But all thanks goes to Jehovah because we feel he's the one that really worked it out. I made it back to West Palm to meet Tyler (he had to stay behind and pick up the nonrefundable rental car we reserved in his name) at 7 which was just the right time to make it the 1 hr 30min trip to FLL airport and return our rental car on time. Then we checked in, went through TSA, and then waited another 2 hours for our plane to board. We made it to Panama and went through customs and security and got to our overnight place to stay with Brother and Sister Almengor at about 3:30. We slept for about 3 hours, then got up and went to town , had lunch, then bought bus tickets to where we are now, in a place called Bugaba. So we have been traveling for a while, and sleep deprivation is a real thing haha. But luckily last night we had about 7 hours of sleep.

 Also, another "bump" was that we left chargers for our cameras and tablets but we still have the chargers for our phones and computer which should be sufficient to take pictures and of course post to the blog. We didn't take too many pictures because we've been on the go and didn't want to draw attention to ourselves in certain places in Panama City because its very crowded, but we will take more in the upcoming day.

We have had 30 to 40 min conversations in Spanish with a brother we stayed with. Our Spanish is basic but we can get our thoughts across and understand pretty much 80% of what's being said. I am really surprised at how much we are able to say with the little we know. We hope that by the time we come back, we will be very comfortable with the language. But it does get tiring to translate what you hear in Spanish into English and then translate your English response into a Spanish response. But the more we did it, the easier it was.

Some pics of what we saw in Panama City, more explanation will come in a later post:

Tomorrow we go out in Service with an English couple from a Spanish congregation. Then we take the bus to Puerto Armuelles. We'll expound on our experiences so far later and post more pics sometime later this week. But here are some pictures we took of our 15 min walk back to Bro. Whittle's home from the town of Bugaba.

Tyler will post parts of his journal soon.

Have a great night.

-Bri'Ana