Panama was my very favorite place to live growing up.
Ariana, Jesse, Christian James, Melanni, and Rebecca
Melanni performing a Panamanian dance in her pollera dress. I loved seeing her all dressed up. The pretty ornaments in her hair are called tembleques. I loved how white and sparkly the tembleques were. I remember Mom telling us that they were made from fish scales. I still don't know how they make fish scales look so white and pretty.
Ariana
So, that's me in the gym at my school, Curundu Elementary. I have no idea what is going on here. Maybe an assembly? I don't know. I have a few memories of this gym.
1. There was a short boy named Eduardo in my class, and he could run REALLY fast. I remember thinking that he looked like Mario from the Mario Brothers Nintendo game when he ran because his arms moved so fast they looked blurry.
2. One time in gym class, it started pouring rain. You can see that at the top of the gym, the walls are just chain link fence. The rain came in gushes and flooded the room. Soon, we were soaked and standing in inches of water. I thought it was really fun, but I bet the teachers were scared.
3. During recess, one of my favorite things to do was dig for ant lions in the dirt with my friends outside the buildings.
If you don't know what an antlion is, here's a picture:
Here's the weird thing. I didn't know this was an antlion until about 20 seconds ago when I searched online to find a picture for you. Apparently, what I was catching all those years ago in Panama was the antlion larva. Yep, I liked stuff like that.
We used to catch these all the time and hold them in our bare hands. Panama was awesome! (Oh, and this is blown up like a thousand times. They were only the size of the eraser on the end of a pencil.)
This is how we knew where to dig for an antlion. (Ahem. Excuse me. Antlion larva.) There was a definite technique to it because those buggers were fast and the mound of sand around their little sand pit trap would always start caving into the hole.
I loved it! Although, you couldn't pay me to hold one now!
You loved holding and catching bugs in Panama! I am not surprised that that's what you did during recess(0: I have some memories in that gym, too. Like Alberto saying "I'm going to marry you MelaNOSE!" He gave me a serious complex about my nose! I pretended like I didn't like him, but secretly it made me happy that he flirted with me (this was 1st grade! Yikes!). I remember we used Alberto VO5 Shampoo in panama and I thought it was pretty nifty that his name was on our shampoo bottle. I also remember dancing in that polerra dress. I felt so pretty! And that detail about the hair ornaments being made out of fish scales really stood out to me, too, because I always remember that when I look at the picture.
ReplyDeleteThat's funny! I remember that shampoo, too!
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