Getting ready / Preparando

¡Hola a todos! Hey everyone!

So, Monday is Go Day for Panama, and I have a long list of things to do. I've already bought my plane ticket, but I keep an eye on the airline's website for any flight updates or problems. My flight leaves at 6:15 a.m., so I'll have to be at the airport around 4:30 to check in. My very beautiful and wonderful mother is taking me to the airport. I think I'll need to bake her cookies when I get back.

I'll be staying with my friend Saul and his family while I'm in Panama. Saul is a flight attendant, and he won't be back in Panama City until Tuesday morning, so I've booked a bed in a hostel for Monday night. Hostels are awesome (forget any horror movies you might have seen) because you can meet all kinds of fabulous people from all over the world. Hostels are not the same as hotels. In this particular hostel (http://www.lunascastlehostel.com/), I will have a bed in a 10-bed dorm room, share a bathroom with other travelers, and breakfast is included for $13 total. It's not the cheapest hostel I've ever stayed in, but it got great reviews on www.hostelworld.com (for future reference, the cheapest hostel I ever stayed in was about $3.50 a night). The idea of sharing a large dorm room and a bathroom with strangers doesn't appeal to everyone. Honestly, though, some of my best traveling stories come from staying in hostels. Travelers who stay in hostels are some of the friendliest and most helpful people you'll ever meet. Hopefully other people have thought of me as friendly and helpful :)

I've started getting things together, but I haven't really packed yet. When I travel, I use a 65L hiking backpack, no matter how long I'll be traveling. When I went to Brazil, I lived out of my backpack for five weeks. At its heaviest, it weighed around 28 pounds, including some pretty hefty hiking boots. Since I'll only be gone a week on this trip, I imagine my pack will be a little lighter (and I won't be taking the hiking boots on this one!).

I started a list of things I'd like to see and do in the city this week. I don't know how much I'll be able to do, but here's what I've got:
- the Panama Canal
- explore Casco Viejo (that's the neighborhood where my hostel is!)
- visit the ruins of Old Panama City (from 1519)
- bike riding on the Amador Causeway (a strip of land built up to protect the harbor for ships entering the canal)
- Good Friday parade

Funny enough, there was an episode of House Hunters International on HGTV on Friday, and it was in the Casco Viejo neighborhood of Panama City! That really got me excited for this trip.

It's always a good idea to check the weather for any place you're traveling, and I checked the 10-day forecast for Panama City, Panama today: high of 96ºF and low of 75ºF all week long. I'll freeze when I get back to our lovely 45ºF weather! Temperature is measured in Centigrade, which is a different scale than Fahrenheit. So, while it's a high of 96º Fahrenheit, it's actually 36º Centigrade. And while today's high temperature in our area was 45ºF, it's actually 7ºC. It's a bit confusing at first, but once you get used to it, it's just as easy to follow as Fahrenheit. In fact, the centigrade scale is based on the freezing and boiling temperature of water. So 32ºF is 0ºC (the freezing temperature of water), and 212ºF is 100ºC (the boiling point of water). Hooray for science and math!

So, anything I've missed? Any suggestions for things to see or do?