Craig and I are doing some dog sitting in Valle Escondido this week. It got us out of our routine for a bit. I forgot how much I missed having a dog, and Skylar, a golden retriever, has been a pleasure to watch.
I sure have been getting my exercise walking around this little slice of heaven, with its hilly terrain and beautiful vistas. It’s accessibility to town is also a bonus. The temperature is also a lot cooler than our place in Alto, which is great for sleeping with the windows open.
Internet
Another thing we’ve been working on was switching internet providers. Up until now, the only thing available to us was satellite internet with Cable Onda. If we’re lucky, we get 8 mb download and 1 mb upload at a cost of around $62/month. That is just internet, no TV. Over the past month or so, we’ve seen a new provider running lines in our neighborhood, Cable & Wireless Panamá. We went into the local office last week and signed up. We had a good experience at the Boquete office. The young lady who helped us spoke pretty good English, and along with our limited español, we were able to accomplish setting this up! The plan we signed up for is $58/month + tax for 150 mb download, basic TV cable service and phone. Big win!
Now we had to wait for a call for installation. That was interesting. We had an appointment on a Monday morning slot, we waited until 2 PM, and no one showed up. No phone call from them either. I called them using the English option (which is was impressed with), and was told someone would get back to us.
Long story short, with lots of phone calls later, and another appointment set for Thursday, we got a call on Wednesday saying they were at our house, really? Since we’re dog sitting, we had to rush over there to meet them. There was a little bit of a language barrier, but we understood their position that lots of the trees on our rental property needed to be topped in order to accommodate running the line to our house which is set back a way from the street. As well as a large tree of our adjacent neighbor had to be topped. Since this a rental, having to deal with these obstacles and additional expense wasn’t going to work for us. We just have to live with our 8 MB internet. It was a lot of time running in circles.
In my next post I hope to discuss the Corona Virus situation in Panamá.