Black Week in Panama

Santa Claus is coming to ... the Multicentro Mall in Downtown Panama City

It's Thanksgiving week.  (Well, it's the Friday Before, which in American vacation-language makes it part of Thanksgiving week.)  I wanted to take a trip to decompress from my rather successful jury trial in October.  And we all want to go someplace homey for a traditional Thanksgiving.

I'm now in Panama City, Panama, for my take on the traditional start to the Thanksgiving.  By Monday, I'll be in Colombia for more Giving of the Thanks, but for now I'm in rain-soaked Panama City.  The one in the Republic of Panama.  Not the one is Far Southern Alabama.

It is a rainy day in Panama.  Which makes sense, seeing that the rainy season here starts in early January and continues until the end of December.  Panama City is a gleaming modern city packed with skyscrapers (which it can be, since it is both geologically stable and out of the hurricane zone, despite its tropical setting).  I am staying at the Hotel Plaza Paitilla Inn:

Retro chic!  Which, as you know, is the only kind of "chic" that I'm into it.  Well, other than the band that did "Le Freak."  I'm into that kind of Chic, too.

From my room on the 14th Floor, which is really the 13th Floor but I'm not supposed to do the math, the view to the right is awesome.  To the left ...

Not as awesome.  More buildings from the same era.  Less chic, however.

It's right near the humongous Hard Rock Hotel, which is by far the biggest hotel in Panama City:

It's so close, that's where I went for dinner.

Well, more specifically to the mall attached to it.  Glad to see that grafting mega-malls onto mega-casinos is not merely a Las Vegas thing.  It's in Panama, too.

And the mall was, as one would expect for mid-November, decked to the rafters in Christmas tidings:

Ho ho ho, indeed.

The above display is supposed to convey the wonders of finding a BMW under your Christmas tree.

Apparently it is now "Black Week" at the mall.  In Panama, "Black Friday" cannot be constrained to a single day.  It bleeds over into a whole week.  And the weekend before the whole week.

I really did dig this "little Christmas village" display.  It was genuinely nice:

And even though they do have penguins in Latin America (Chile, Argentina, the Galapagos), I still don't approve of this:

Penguins are creatures of the South Pole.  Santa is from the North Pole.  Never the 'twain shall meet.

Dinner tonight was mall food court fast-food Argentine food.

Because I'm on vacation and on vacation I try new things.  And mall food court fast-food Argentine was a new thing for me.

Now that I'm filled up on unphotographed milanesa and an empanada de queso (both delicioso), it was time to walk through the light rain back, over the pedestrian overpass, and back to the hotel.