The hostel sucks, my friends had left the shitty toilets didn't work again, there was no decoration no common area, plastic walls no lockers in the room. It all added up to be extremely annoying. This may very well be worst place I ever stayed. Which added to the frustration was the fact that they knew they were shit but the owner didn't care and squeezed every penny out of the situation that all the other hostels were fully booked. The prices were the same as the ones in the two hostels with 90ish % reviews. This could only sustain while the good hostels were full and the owner (who was never present - for hs own safety I guess) knew this. The staff was nice and they tried to keep the customers happy but this was near to impossible with these conditions.
I really wanted to get out and change the hostel. The whole situation dragged me down and may have impacted my impression of Panama.
So I went out and asked at the other two hostels around the area if they had space but even two days after the Carnival they were still full. Even if it was only for one night (the last one in Panama) I wanted to move and at least enjoy the last sleep in Central America.
So I booked a night (20th to 21st) in the Magnolia Inn - It even had a fancy description of being a boutique Hostel... can only be better than the White lion.
Back at my hostel (I had only one more night left) I met Claus from Austria, who was a very interesting character. He had cycled down from California on his bike through entire Central America to Panama over the last three months and planned to head on to South America next. He was one of those guys you read about .... someone who could write a book similar to Ted Simon's Jupiters Travels.
To lift my spirit I went to the mall to see if consumption could fix this issue. I was looking for new headphones since the one I had were falling apart slowly but surely. Not much of electronic stores in this mall though, instead however they had a great food court where I got a big Burrito that helped a bit.
Otherwise the mall was not very exciting so I went back to the hostel and decided to relax in the room and do nothing for a while.
After an hour or two I felt guilty for wasting time in this place instead of enjoying the last couple of days in Panama. As I had heard some firecrackers out there and I knew it was Asian new year I decided to go on a search to find out from where they cracker sound came.
That felt a little bit more useful than sitting in the room and I soon was rewarded when I found the street where all the Chinese shops were.
Here the Chinese community (it seems there is one in every city in the world) had gathered and two dragons were going from shop to shop to pass on some good luck for the year ahead to the owners. All this was accompanied by every longer chains of firecrackers that were certainly going to be illegal in Europe.
The Dragons danced, the firecrackers fired up, the dragons went into the shop and on the went to repeat the whole procedure at the next shop.
But this was enough for the day. I headed back to the Hostel and spent a good few hours following up on the blog and nearly finished the entries all the way till the end of New Zealand.
With this work done, now it was time to reward myself a bit. I went out to find a nice place - actually the one where I had the burger before... I was already well known there and ordered a steak. Or what I thought was a steak but turned out to be a hot plate of beef strips covered with onions, tomatos and peppers. It was really juicy and tender (although already cut in strips) and very, very tasty.
The only downside was the fact that chips were under the steak strips and had soaked in the juice. But therefore I got crispy onion rings with it.
Staying true to my week of lent I had a lemonade and went home to continue writing my blog and ignored all social opportunities that were offered by people from the hostel that went out for drink.
Instead I watched Indiana Jones IV (I know, I know, but I was on a Indy run) with some parts playing in South America which did increase the craving for my next stop: Chile.
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