Last night I attended my first big gringo bash, Christmas PanaParty style, this time with a legit invitation and not tagging along with the band or pretending to be part of the help. The party was packed by the time we got there. I was surprised at the number of people I knew, even more surprised by the number I didn’t. So many expats! I knew thirty people out of over a hundred.
The location was more castle than house–an elaborate display of carved polished wood and stone, multiple levels, winding stone pathways with candles, a stunning location, perched on the side of the mountain toward Santa Catarina. I’ve learned there are many hidden castles around the lake, tucked behind walls in unexpected places. Gringos quietly and blissfully living in their little slices of heaven.
The long banquet table was jammed with food from every corner of the world, with a goofy watermelon frog watching over the rotation of plates of goodies. The booze table was even more impressive, three long tables loaded up with bottles and boxes. Those ex-hippies can pound their liquor. Not big on non-alcoholic beverages or even mixers, so I ended up with water as the non-alcoholic choice, which means people were drinking the hard stuff sans mixers. Hardcore. And don’t underestimate those skinny yoga women, they do their part.
While most people were being appropriately polite and not hovering over the food, my guate girlfriend and I parked ourselves in front of the table and shamelessly feasted like we hadn’t eaten in weeks, elbows flying. Mama didn’t raise no shy fool when it comes to free food. When you are raised by two poor immigrant parents, something you are taught as soon as your chin can clear the table, is never hestitate or be overly polite when it comes to free food (Immigrant lesson 101). Now, I’m not one to forget my roots. I started with 11 pieces of sushi, 8 chicken wings, 6 crackers of crab dip, 8 meatballs (5 bbq and 3 sweet and sour), 2 pineapple and watermelon shishkobobs, 3 bean tostitos, 3 deviled eggs, a plate of nachos, 3 peanut butter brownies, followed by a token piece of broccoli chaser. That was before my stomach even registered that I’d started eating. That was only round one. Did you proud, mama. Later people would politely ask if I had gotten anything to eat and I would respond, “Yes, a bit.”
The group was ecclectic, wait, more like ecclectic on steroids. Truly a fascinating and amusing mix of people, some a bit older, with lifetimes packed full of crazy offbeat stories from around the world. You could have plucked anyone out of the crowd and listened to them for hours. A common denominator for many would be a good amount of time spent in their hippy phase, as you can still see traces reflected in clothing, attitudes, and little groups on the balconies huddled around a shared stick. The collective knows how to have a good time. The live band played from a balcony, and people danced on every level of the house, including the roof. From every part of the house you could look out over the width of the entire lake, with the full-moon illuminating every volcano, the lake on full sparkle. Magical moment on steroids.
People drank, ate, smoked, reconnected, smoked some more. The social web is small but elaborate. There is extensive overlapping history between panafolk, whether business, romantic, friendship, good, bad, and ugly. If you make a people map with all the various links and connections, it would look like a toddler’s scribbled artwork. I can’t even keep track of who is whose ex, much less who owes who money. Here you can’t run too far from your past because it’s always in your face, and in case you become forgetful, the town is equipped with many eager historians to remind you.
The story.
Yes, the story. When at a party in North America, a common leading ice breaker may be, “What do you do?” Here the leading question is always, “So, what’s your story,” meaning, how the heck did you end up here? Some common threads of stories I’ve heard include, passing through as a tourist and falling in love with the place, draft-dodging, running from the law, running from an ex-husband/wife, running from love gone wrong, running from life, running from oneself, just running, maxing out the hippy phase in a place where you can grow and smoke without prosecution, finding a spiritual connection with the lake. Many stories are packed with some crazy drama, a time period of world travel, perhaps a small or heaping dose of anti-Americanism, a failed business or three, a peppering of strained family relations, or just being totally whacked out strange. The place draws a different kind of person, certainly one who can live with a degree of unpredictablity when it comes to water, electricity, natural disasters (hurricanes, flooding, volcanoes, earthquakes), lack of service standards, ongoing threat of theft. But despite these drawbacks, some are clearly drawn to this adventure of living on the fringe, me for one.
So when people ask me for my story, I warn them that mine is not the usual PanaPilgrimage story. It doesn’t involve me running from the long arm of the law, from bad family relations, a crazy ex, from feeling disenfranchised from the First World. I wasn’t drawn here to tap into all the new age stuff or to the freedom to smoke myself braindead on weed. It all started with a simple desire to give our girls an international experience, and what an experience.
Almost everyone here, unless they are lucky to live off a plump pension, is either entrepreneurial by nature, or has ended up being so just out of necessity. People are creative in how they end up making a living and will often have a long list of creative attempts that didn’t work. These failed attempts seem to either increase the resilience in a person or the bitterness. You can talk to a person for less than a couple of minutes to see how their entrepreneurial history has left them in its wake.
The lake seems to attract many more new age gringos than those participating in traditional religions, with eastern religions the exception. Some were joking (but not really) about the evolution of human enlightenment starting with groups like Mormons, with Christianity not far behind, making it’s way through some kind of hippy stage (some debated this isn’t a spiritual stage, while others would retort “clearly you haven’t tried acid”) then through any of the eastern religions like Buddhism, with the final stages of enlightenment moving through atheism arriving at agnostic. Everyone laughed, but more so in an act of agreement. A ice breaker for this group, would be to divide themselves into the following four groups:
Group 1. Agnostic-Atheists: does not believe any god exists, but doesn’t claim to know whether this is actually true. Group 2. Gnostic-Atheists: believes that no god exists and claims to know that this belief is true. Group 3. Agnostic-Theists: believes a god exists, but doesn’t claim to know that this belief is true. Group 4. Gnostic-Theists: believes a god exists and claims to know that this belief is true. Then administer alcohol and whatever they are smoking, and see if they end up in the same group a second time.
Throughout the evening I looked at this hodgepodge of quirky people, listened to their laughter, their stories, living in what has to be one of the most beautiful places on this earth, and I did feel a kind of warm kinship, even if it may have been a result of the three large tables of consumed booze. I know that even though we are wildly diverse, we share living out an adventure, for however long, in this unique place of unsurpassable beauty, fringe living on steroids.