#9 - Temple Tour

11/02/2011

Today was our first and last day in Panama City as a group, and was a tour of local temples and religious houses.

We started off with the very beautiful Baha´i Temple, cool design and on top of a massive hill so it is visible from as far away as possible and has a great backdrop. Look it up on Google Images.
It has no windows so was beautifully fresh and had lovely flowers.

We then went to a Hindu Temple, much more simple and with small statues of their various gods with different skin colours and various animal limbs stuck on to them. I went to a balcony and saw a guy right outside urinating against a tree which somewhat spoiled the vibe.

Next was a Muslim mosque - the guy who showed us round had good English and explained Islam succinctly, and I take my hat off for their 5 separate hours of prayer each day, that´s commendable devotion. But when he described Allah I couldn´t help but feel there was the fear and respect but with none of the joy and happiness that we Christians receive from God. They begrudgingly let the girls in but didn´t look them in the eye and referred to them as ´these´ right in front of them - not cool.

Last was a Greek Orthodox church, kind of Catholic in aesthetic with lots of gold and bright colours and statues and pictures of saints. Everything symbolises something, from special cloths to the number of pillars and the layout and stuff. And the Priest sang to us in almost a Muslim-sounding chant which seemed to last forever. He was a lovely bloke though.

Throughout these tours we obviously didn´t mention the fact that we are Christian Missionaries, it may not have gone down well particularly in the mosque or temple. The Baha´is are accepting and including of all religions, believing them to all be revelations of God appropriate to the time they formed so we were more than welcome there. But given past and present Christian-Muslim conflict, which is a big shame, it wouldn´t have been the most tactful thing to say.

We then went to the old city, lots of nice colonial European-looking architecture. Loads of people were selling locally made hats and rugs - I´m going to buy a Panama Hat the day before I return, they´re so cool. A man was sitting on a wall with a snake round his neck, and tried to charge us $5 to have a picture which we didn´t accept.

Our team is gelling well, the fact we all have English as our first language is lucky and means we can all trade banter and insults about each other´s cultures. To be honest, it´s mostly everyone attacking the Americans, including Jarett who´s Canadian, for their culture of excess and fast food and stuff - it´s fun. We´re going to buy them some proper chocolate because as I alluded to yesterday, they just have Hersheys which I wouldn´t wish upon my worst enemy. Dairy Milk is available in certain places here, so we´re going to open their eyes to proper chocolate.

We then went to a shopping mall to get some stuff such as sun lotion and nail clippers. I tried to go to the toilet but it was like the room in the Department of Mysteries in the fifth Harry Potter book with identical doors and it confused me. If you don´t understand that reference, it was essentially a neverending labyrinth. We almost managed to get Andrew to go to the girls toilets but he saw the sign at the last minute.
For pudding, I had Oreo ice-cream which was absolutely lush - one rare example of the Americans doing chocolate well. Also had more of the delicious coffee.

We got to the bus terminal at 10pm to get our 7-hour bus to Volcan, our base for the next week of training - however, it left at midnight so we had to kill time in the only building I have experienced so far not to have air conditioning. Suffice to say I felt sorry for my t-shirt afterwards. Jessica and Christina taught us Egyptian Rat Race which is an intense card game, so the time went kind of quickly.
Then we boarded the bus.

That was yesterday - I´ll put the second half of the journey and the rest of today´s events in a separate entry cos I want to keep to 1 post representing 1 day as much as is possible - obviously that won´t be possible when we go into the jungle to do outreach as we´ll be lucky to get to a computer once a week, but I´´ll stick a separate post on here this evening.

Chao for now.

JG