So its New Years eve!! Where has the year gone?! It seems only yesterday that Huw was engrossed in work at Vf and Bernice was fighting with her dissertation. Wah!

Will we make any NY resolutions. Who knows. Have any of you?

The day is pretty full on today and a planned siesta (we’re back in Spanish time after all) doesn’t happen much to Bernice’s dismay.

Some successful shopping means we have our new wee treat to ourselves. A mini netbook, smaller than A5 and pretty light. It’s what we decided would help to keep the photo’s up to date and help us put them back into the flow of the blog. We had fun trying to buy it. It seemed impossible to buy one with an English operating system on it. Everyone kept telling us they had just Spanish ones. Then just as we’d exhausted the shops and about to give up we spotted a big “Curries” like shop called Audiofoto (a chain we’d already tried) the sales guy in there said the make we were looking at all gave you the choice on first start up. So with his agreement to set it up if we bought one (just in case it wasn’t possible and we could then get a refund) we went ahead. Low and behold he knew his stuff and it turned out we’d been dealing with muppets all day previous to this!!!

It also means on skype calls we can use video too now. That said we had got the upgrade from skype to our iPhones that said video is now possible on that. Except we don’t have the iPhone 4 with the dual camera so either we see who we’re calling or they see us….. Unless geniusly we stand in front of a mirror – which is what we did while talking to Rachael and Dene this morning. That was fun!!

The plan had been a sleep next as we said but we met Donna and Nathan when we got back to the hostel. They had some cold beers just sat there getting warm so we felt obliged to help them out with them. We have quite a good exchange of stories and Donna makes us all laugh be mistakenly thinking we have a garden full of cannabis back home!!! Apparently, Canadians say “potted” plants 😀

And so the evening progressed. We had a short interlude to get showered and changed and then met up for dinner downstairs again. They fancied it as they’d seen there was a special menu for tonight. The plan then was the roof to watch the city fireworks and then wander to town looking for the fiestas. Part of that worked. Our dinner was great and the fireworks amazing. 360deg! Everywhere we looked they were going off. No one big official show as far as we could tell just lots of little private ones. There were even some being fired horizontally out of a hi-rise!! Health and safety would have thrown a track back in the UK. Our roof was pretty busy and a good atmosphere.

Finding any action, parties of any kind in town was a total failure though. We hardly even saw any people let alone any fiesta!! One lone bar was open so tired from wandering around and more than a little thirsty, we made for there. There were only a handful of punters there too. Either the custom in Panama is really for house parties at NY or we are totally in the wrong part of town. That said you’d have thought we’d have heard something or saw some clue….

Oh well, after a drink, and Bernice having a hat (sorry sombrero) given to her, we head back to the hostel and the four of us prop the bar up for a while longer – chatting to a crazy Colombian, the hotel owner and anyone else who got within range!!

Happy New Year everyone!! :0) xxxx