When the most famous landmark of an entire country is a canal, you know you're in for a real treat! After the magic of San Blas, I returned to mainland civilisation and city life in the bustling Panama City. Having seen the city on such amazing TV shows as Prison Break, I was quite excited to see how it is in real life... and of course to see whether this canal really is worth all the fuss that gets attached to it.

First of all I have to say I was hugely disappointed with the Panama Canal. I have no idea what I was expecting, but I really thought it would be something impressive. The locks work just as slowly and painfully as the ones in any other canal in the world and it does not smell too great. Yes, it is huge and a pretty incredible engineering success, but at the end of the day it is just a canal! Having sat and watched for aaaagggggeeeeesssss for one of the locks to open I was very glad that I did not decided to pay excessive amounts of cash to spend the day sailing the full length of it. I did not get to see any of the huge freight boats passing though, which would've made things a little more exciting, but I did not want to hang around for another few hours staring at not a lot happening on the off chance that one passed by.

The canal site also hosts a museum which is again pretty disappointing. I heard that the one in the city itself is a lot better, but by the time I had been to one museum and the canal itself I was all "canalled out". One of the most interesting things at the museum was a boat simulation room where you can pretend you are driving one of the huge ships down the Panama Canal. I had fun powering into the sides of the canal and causing lots of damage! From this you can see that I was already getting bored with it all. Another sure sign that I was getting bored was that I stole the hat of a model fireman and posed with him whilst wearing it... obviously I returned it after the shot had been taken! I don't even know what the relevance of that exhibit was in the museum as I had totally lost interest.

Other than a little bit of shopping, a couple of nights out and a wander around the old city I did not do much else in Panama City. I think my favourite thing here is the chicken buses - old US school buses that seem to have featured on "Pimp My Ride", although they could do with making the seats enough for adults' knees! Apparently they get better the further North you go, so I am very excited to get to Guatemala. The hostel I was in was very nice and I actually did a fair bit of vegging out on the sofa watching films which is something I have not done for a very long time. I treated the throngs of Israelis staying there to a night of British movies which I don't think they appreciated too much, and whenever they would all start talking loudly as everyone else was trying to concentrate of Trainspotting, A Clockwork Orange and This Is England, I used my one and only (incredibly useful) Hebrew phrase which means "be quiet... please". As much I was enjoying the televisual delights of my hostel, I was not impressed by their "10 Commandments" rather than having a rules per se; whoever created them really needs to go back to school and learn about what Thou actually means, when to use it and how to correctly conjugate verbs! 

Even though I am sick of packing my backpack, I decided not to hang around too much in the capital in order to determine if the rest of the country has something more exciting than a canal to offer.