August 23
Well Panama, your roads were very well marked right up until Panama City (which by the way, this city is enormous). After our fail trying to avoid driving Through the city, we accidentally ended up heading due south on Avenue la Paz, straight down into chaos. We pulled off in front of a lavanderia and the sweet owner kindly gave us her wifi password to figure out where we were and how to get out of there (as our paper map of Panama City wasn’t detailed enough). We failed again, but this time we had enough Google map knowledge in our heads to correct our mistake and successfully get back on track. And we had a toucan fly directly overhead! (Ernie saw it first and I think his exact words were “look at that look at that look at that look at that”). Ultimately it only took us three hours to get from our hotel in Coronado to our hotel in Panama City. Which by the way is a total shithole. I’ll be sure and post some pictures (I would go do it now but wifi only works in the lobby, which is puke green, very hot, and very stuffy). It is costing us $40 a night (all taxes included, so probably more like an advertised rate of $32 a night), and it is right by airport. The name of it is “Express Inn”, it is painted pink and seafoam green, and it advertised a pool, free wifi, cable, and secure parking. All of these things are technically true, but not quite what we had in mind for the “Express Inn” one normally finds right next to the airport of major international cities... It is at least half the price of anything else we could find (for example, the Sheraton down the road is $160 a night), and now we see why. The owner is very nice, and once he heard that we were staying for four days and why we are over here (bum foot) instead of in the city, etc. etc. he very kindly offered us to stay in his other hotel. He said we would be much more comfortable there and it has services like restaurants and shops (as we are in no mans land here; nothing but garbage and ditches down this street - seriously - we can easily catch taxis because they come down here to pee or crap in the bushes after dropping off customers at the airport). He showed us where it was on the map and while his other hotel is in a great location, the thought of riding to the middle of this vast, hilly, urban jungle turned both Ernie and I’s stomachs into knots. Thank you generous Mr. Express Inn Owner, but Grandma & Grandpa would rather stay out of the chaos in your pink and seafoam green shithole. One of the two beds is clean/has a clean set of sheets, there are two towels, three bars of soap, a working toilet, a not-cold but not-warm shower, an air conditioner that is working well enough, and a broken TV (a storm took out the cable. “Maybe tomorrow” the woman at the front desk said). The gate out front does lock, so hopefully they lock up the property at night and no one steals our motos. The biggest gringo problem we have here is that there is only one outlet in the room, and it is a foot from the ceiling. We will have to stack our moto luggage on top of the nightstand to charge our iPads and Kindles.
Once we checked in we decided to tackle Tara’s V problem... I had done some research online about healthcare in Panama City and read some blogs and things about where to go and the kinds of experiences other tourists had. I was specifically looking for one with services in English, as a lot could get lost in translation… Google Translate says “vagina” in Spanish is the same as “vagina” in English, but there is surely a subtlety that matters. One can get medical insurance in Panama (for example, if you are a gringo who has come here to retire), or one can just visit and pay the copay at a privately run facility. The prices that I read about ranged from a few hundred to almost a thousand US dollars, depending on what the service was for. That is very expensive, yes. But I was at my limit. Burning uncomfort for almost three weeks now. I self medicated as best I could with items I brought with me from Oregon as well as purchased from various Nicaraguan pharmacies, but combined with the foot pain I decided it was worth hundreds of dollars to have a healthy happy V again (and Ernie agreed ;)
So we take a $25 taxi ~20 km to Clinic Hospital San Fernando. We start the clock to see how long this excursion will take. We figured it takes us three hours to cross a border, so we are betting this will take at least that if not double. After the cab driver gives us a piece of paper with his name and number (Issac says, “If you need another taxi, call me!) we head inside. In a city that is much dirtier up close, the lobby looks like a lobby to a fancy hotel. We think we are at admissions (as the sign says “Admicciones”), and I ask for someone who speaks English. The receptionist gets on the phone and says “un momento”. Within a few minutes Grace - tall, soft spoken Grace - approaches and serves as our personal translator for our entire experience (you know, just like they do in USAmerica with non-English speakers). The first thing I do is embarrass myself… turns out we were at the admissions/reception desk to admit yourself into the hospital for mental conditions, and I start yammering about my broken V. She explains we are in the wrong building “for that” and we walk over to a seven (?) story building where the specialists are. Each floor has a waiting area, a receptionist, and 10-20 individual offices arranged in a horseshoe around the waiting area and receptionist. Each office has the doctors full name (non-trivial for many Latin Americans) and speciality on the door. We go up to the fourth floor and talk to the receptionist. Nope, the gynecologist there is not in the office today. We go the fifth floor. Si, the doctor can see us in five minutes (you know, just like in USAmerica when you don’t have an appointment). While we are waiting Grace offers us tourist advice. She easily convinced us not to rent a car (as Ernie and I tossed around that idea), and recommended this tourist bus that does laps around the city and you buy tickets for however many days you want and is hop-on hop-off and the buses run every hour.
Great. Poof! the doctor will see you now. Dr. Lyla has a little desk with her computer, two chairs, and in the back there is a small examination room with a very festive back support pillow. We talk for about five minutes, with Grace translating. I have a five minute, no-frills but thorough exam, and then head back to her desk/waiting area. Dr. Lyla asks some more questions, and everything made a lot more sense to her once I explained things like camping, motorycycles, sitting in my own warm, wet pants for hours on end, etc. She offers a no-frills but thorough explanation, writes me a few prescriptions, and Grace and Ernie and I depart. We stop at the receptionist and pay $40. She writes my name and passport number in a spiral binder. “Do I need a receipt?” she asks. I said no, but in hindsight I wish I had said yes because knowing Central American obsessions with little pieces of paper, I’d really like to know what that little piece of paper looked like. We go back down to the first floor and we go to the pharmacy. It says to take a number for customer service and just after Grace pulls the next number out of the dispenser the guy behind the counter says “No need, what can I do for you?” (you know, just like any place that makes you take a number in USAmerica). Grace explains for us, passes the scripts to the young man, and within five minutes we have paid $60 for a weeks worth of treatment and some preventative goodies for the next few months. The entirety of the experience took about 55 minutes, and 25 minutes of that was the cab ride there. It is borderline unbelievable how pleasant and easy the experience was. I so very much thank you Panama, from the bottom of my V.
August 24
Today we went full on tourist. After breaking out the camping gear this morning to make ourselves some of our good coffee and granola with the JetBoil, we took a cab downtown (our last long distance cab… thank goodness at $20-30 each) and then bought a two day pass on Panama City Tours. It is a set of red, double decker buses that go around the city - about a dozen stops in total and buses can be expected about every hour. Yes they are tacky and cheezy, but it's fun to be driven around a city you don’t know! Especially on a second story bus. There are a few stops we don’t think we will do, like the mall of duty free shops (we are set on cologne and cigarettes). Or the five square mile mall (exaggeration) that has hundreds of shops, restaurants, rides, and life-sized replicas of animals from all over the world, including pandas, dolphins, and dinosaurs (not an exaggeration). After reading the Panama City Tour brochure, there are four stops Ernie and I both want to check out. Bueno. Two today and two tomorrow.
The first stop was Miraflores Locks of the Panama Canal. Super interesting. The visitor’s center is five stories high, with the fifth floor as the observation deck to the two passages at Miraflores (there are three sets of locks from the Atlantic to Pacific, and the Miraflores are the original set on the Pacific end). We got to see two boats pass through today, one from the fifth floor and one from the ground level. The observation deck was kind of a shit show. Lots of selfies and people filming the action… and it is slow going. Are you really going to make someone watch 15 minutes of a boat rising up in a lock in the canal that you filmed with your bobbing cell phone? It was crowded, babies crying, etc. We had a better experience on the ground floor. We bought a few coffees at the coffee shop and sat on a bench (i.e., let Tara put her foot up for a while) and we watched an empty container ship from China go through. There were only a few people around on the ground level viewing area, and a third of them were Panamanians in Panama hats. There were some Chinese men on the boat taking pictures of Miraflores while the people of Miraflores were taking pictures of them. After our boat viewings there was a very educational movie in a decent sized theater (shown in several different languages throughout the day). And there is also a multi-story set of exhibits that includes everything from how the locks were built to the biodiversity of the surrounding area.
I won’t give a history lesson, but there are four things worth sharing. First, the French started the whole thing first (in the 1880’s), but then gave up almost 10 years into the project. Then years later the USA stepped in and signed a treaty with Panama to give it another go, eventually finishing it in 1913 (bet you regret that one France!). Second, the lake in the middle of the three major locks is 26 meters above sea level; we both thought it was much less than that, so it really put the “engineering marvel” part of the story in perspective. Third, Panama didn’t get full control of the canal until 1999… Damn shame, but better late than never. And fourth, we both knew about the expansion project, but neither one of us knew they were building brand new locks in a new and different location, not expanding the existing locks. So Miraflores continues to have two functioning locks, and both are the same size and equipment as they have been for over 100 years. The new locks (opened in 2016) are to the west of the original locks, took almost 10 years to complete, and can accommodate 98% of the worlds boats. They are ~70 meters wider and 125 meters longer than the original locks, so those 15,000-18,000 TEU container ships can now pass through…. I do wish I could see one of those cross through the Panama Canal. The relationship between the Panama Canal and the design of container ships became very evident through the movie and exhibits and informational placards today (I love me some informational placards). Well done Miraflores - classy and educational. But please ease up on the plastic crap from China in your gift shop (as the irony there is so good it is bad).
Our second stop today was Casco Antiguo (or “Old Quarters”). So beautiful… and maybe a part of Panama City struggling to keep its identity?? Some of the oldest buildings in all of the American continents still stand in Casco Antiguo while Dorito trucks drive by in front of them to stock the local Mini-Super. The cathedral is being worked on so we didn’t get to go inside, but the other plazas, churches, theaters… lovely. Some of the buildings have corrugated tin barriers between the first and second floor; it took us a minute, but the barrier is to prevent crumbling bits of infrastructure from falling on unsuspecting pedestrians and cars below. If I wasn’t a hobbling gimp I am sure Ernie and I would have systematically walked every block to see every building. Lovely. On a particularly skinny calle we saw a sign for a “Taqueria”. We were both hungry but neither of us wanted to pay Casco Antiguo prices. How expensive could tacos be? Three dollars each apparently, but they were impressively delicious. After Ernesto finished his three, he ordered three more. They had two homemade salsas… I am sorry we did not ship all our loved ones a bottle of each.
Post-tacos we hop back on our double decker tourist bus back to where we started the day, and we commit to taking public transportation home. In part for the adventure, but also to get it figured out so that we can cheaply get to and from the city on Friday and Saturday. We had some information (from the internet) before we started, but the details are always the hard part. Yes, we know we need bus cards and can’t pay in cash. Yes, we know we can recharge the bus cards at bus stations, but where are the bus stations? There are no mass produced paper copies or website of stops and transit times. And where does one buy the cards to begin with, because you can’t buy them at bus stations - you can only recharge cards at bus stations (if in fact that kiosk works, which many don’t). Luckily with Ernie’s eagle eyes it was only about five blocks and 45 minutes of fumbling until we had a loaded bus card in our hands (we were in a very central part of Panama City). We also totally fumbled getting on the bus itself… you have to scan and then go through a turnstile and then pass the card to the other person, then they scan the card and go through turnstyle. Sounds easy enough except there are 25 Panamanians pushing and shoving to scan and go through the turnstyle during the 30 seconds the bus is stopped, so doing things in any sort of order is difficult. But whatever! We have figured it out, and tomorrow we can take the free shuttle to and from our hotel to the airport (and by shuttle they probably mean sitting in the back of a pickup truck, stay tuned), then take a $1.50 bus ride from the airport to double decker tourist town and/or whatever strikes our fancy.
This is all good news because this hotel… ugh. It is depressing. The TV is still broken (“Maybe tomorrow”, the woman at the desk said again today. I don’t think it has ever worked). We tried doing a little wifi in the lobby when we got back today but after 15 minutes of slow Apple rainbow wheels of death we became cranky. The green lobby room is so incredibly stifling. How can a room with windows and a door and a fan be that hot and stuffy??? When we looked at our pictures (mostly of the canal, but also a few I took of the hotel) Ernie said the lobby looks nicer in the picture than it does in person. And that tiled “thing” below the Panama sign and above the garbage can in our pictures? That is the pool. And Ernie just reminded me of their free breakfast this morning, as “breakfast included” was also on the list of hotel perks along with cable, wifi, pool, etc. The free breakfast was coffee and white toast. Like Wonder Bread white and Folgers brown. No toaster, but little packets of butter piled up like dominos. And everyone in the hotel (who are obviously cheap like us) piled in the hot and sweaty room trying to use the wifi while eating white bread and butter. Ugh.
Well Panama, your roads were very well marked right up until Panama City (which by the way, this city is enormous). After our fail trying to avoid driving Through the city, we accidentally ended up heading due south on Avenue la Paz, straight down into chaos. We pulled off in front of a lavanderia and the sweet owner kindly gave us her wifi password to figure out where we were and how to get out of there (as our paper map of Panama City wasn’t detailed enough). We failed again, but this time we had enough Google map knowledge in our heads to correct our mistake and successfully get back on track. And we had a toucan fly directly overhead! (Ernie saw it first and I think his exact words were “look at that look at that look at that look at that”). Ultimately it only took us three hours to get from our hotel in Coronado to our hotel in Panama City. Which by the way is a total shithole. I’ll be sure and post some pictures (I would go do it now but wifi only works in the lobby, which is puke green, very hot, and very stuffy). It is costing us $40 a night (all taxes included, so probably more like an advertised rate of $32 a night), and it is right by airport. The name of it is “Express Inn”, it is painted pink and seafoam green, and it advertised a pool, free wifi, cable, and secure parking. All of these things are technically true, but not quite what we had in mind for the “Express Inn” one normally finds right next to the airport of major international cities... It is at least half the price of anything else we could find (for example, the Sheraton down the road is $160 a night), and now we see why. The owner is very nice, and once he heard that we were staying for four days and why we are over here (bum foot) instead of in the city, etc. etc. he very kindly offered us to stay in his other hotel. He said we would be much more comfortable there and it has services like restaurants and shops (as we are in no mans land here; nothing but garbage and ditches down this street - seriously - we can easily catch taxis because they come down here to pee or crap in the bushes after dropping off customers at the airport). He showed us where it was on the map and while his other hotel is in a great location, the thought of riding to the middle of this vast, hilly, urban jungle turned both Ernie and I’s stomachs into knots. Thank you generous Mr. Express Inn Owner, but Grandma & Grandpa would rather stay out of the chaos in your pink and seafoam green shithole. One of the two beds is clean/has a clean set of sheets, there are two towels, three bars of soap, a working toilet, a not-cold but not-warm shower, an air conditioner that is working well enough, and a broken TV (a storm took out the cable. “Maybe tomorrow” the woman at the front desk said). The gate out front does lock, so hopefully they lock up the property at night and no one steals our motos. The biggest gringo problem we have here is that there is only one outlet in the room, and it is a foot from the ceiling. We will have to stack our moto luggage on top of the nightstand to charge our iPads and Kindles.
Once we checked in we decided to tackle Tara’s V problem... I had done some research online about healthcare in Panama City and read some blogs and things about where to go and the kinds of experiences other tourists had. I was specifically looking for one with services in English, as a lot could get lost in translation… Google Translate says “vagina” in Spanish is the same as “vagina” in English, but there is surely a subtlety that matters. One can get medical insurance in Panama (for example, if you are a gringo who has come here to retire), or one can just visit and pay the copay at a privately run facility. The prices that I read about ranged from a few hundred to almost a thousand US dollars, depending on what the service was for. That is very expensive, yes. But I was at my limit. Burning uncomfort for almost three weeks now. I self medicated as best I could with items I brought with me from Oregon as well as purchased from various Nicaraguan pharmacies, but combined with the foot pain I decided it was worth hundreds of dollars to have a healthy happy V again (and Ernie agreed ;)
So we take a $25 taxi ~20 km to Clinic Hospital San Fernando. We start the clock to see how long this excursion will take. We figured it takes us three hours to cross a border, so we are betting this will take at least that if not double. After the cab driver gives us a piece of paper with his name and number (Issac says, “If you need another taxi, call me!) we head inside. In a city that is much dirtier up close, the lobby looks like a lobby to a fancy hotel. We think we are at admissions (as the sign says “Admicciones”), and I ask for someone who speaks English. The receptionist gets on the phone and says “un momento”. Within a few minutes Grace - tall, soft spoken Grace - approaches and serves as our personal translator for our entire experience (you know, just like they do in USAmerica with non-English speakers). The first thing I do is embarrass myself… turns out we were at the admissions/reception desk to admit yourself into the hospital for mental conditions, and I start yammering about my broken V. She explains we are in the wrong building “for that” and we walk over to a seven (?) story building where the specialists are. Each floor has a waiting area, a receptionist, and 10-20 individual offices arranged in a horseshoe around the waiting area and receptionist. Each office has the doctors full name (non-trivial for many Latin Americans) and speciality on the door. We go up to the fourth floor and talk to the receptionist. Nope, the gynecologist there is not in the office today. We go the fifth floor. Si, the doctor can see us in five minutes (you know, just like in USAmerica when you don’t have an appointment). While we are waiting Grace offers us tourist advice. She easily convinced us not to rent a car (as Ernie and I tossed around that idea), and recommended this tourist bus that does laps around the city and you buy tickets for however many days you want and is hop-on hop-off and the buses run every hour.
Great. Poof! the doctor will see you now. Dr. Lyla has a little desk with her computer, two chairs, and in the back there is a small examination room with a very festive back support pillow. We talk for about five minutes, with Grace translating. I have a five minute, no-frills but thorough exam, and then head back to her desk/waiting area. Dr. Lyla asks some more questions, and everything made a lot more sense to her once I explained things like camping, motorycycles, sitting in my own warm, wet pants for hours on end, etc. She offers a no-frills but thorough explanation, writes me a few prescriptions, and Grace and Ernie and I depart. We stop at the receptionist and pay $40. She writes my name and passport number in a spiral binder. “Do I need a receipt?” she asks. I said no, but in hindsight I wish I had said yes because knowing Central American obsessions with little pieces of paper, I’d really like to know what that little piece of paper looked like. We go back down to the first floor and we go to the pharmacy. It says to take a number for customer service and just after Grace pulls the next number out of the dispenser the guy behind the counter says “No need, what can I do for you?” (you know, just like any place that makes you take a number in USAmerica). Grace explains for us, passes the scripts to the young man, and within five minutes we have paid $60 for a weeks worth of treatment and some preventative goodies for the next few months. The entirety of the experience took about 55 minutes, and 25 minutes of that was the cab ride there. It is borderline unbelievable how pleasant and easy the experience was. I so very much thank you Panama, from the bottom of my V.
August 24
Today we went full on tourist. After breaking out the camping gear this morning to make ourselves some of our good coffee and granola with the JetBoil, we took a cab downtown (our last long distance cab… thank goodness at $20-30 each) and then bought a two day pass on Panama City Tours. It is a set of red, double decker buses that go around the city - about a dozen stops in total and buses can be expected about every hour. Yes they are tacky and cheezy, but it's fun to be driven around a city you don’t know! Especially on a second story bus. There are a few stops we don’t think we will do, like the mall of duty free shops (we are set on cologne and cigarettes). Or the five square mile mall (exaggeration) that has hundreds of shops, restaurants, rides, and life-sized replicas of animals from all over the world, including pandas, dolphins, and dinosaurs (not an exaggeration). After reading the Panama City Tour brochure, there are four stops Ernie and I both want to check out. Bueno. Two today and two tomorrow.
The first stop was Miraflores Locks of the Panama Canal. Super interesting. The visitor’s center is five stories high, with the fifth floor as the observation deck to the two passages at Miraflores (there are three sets of locks from the Atlantic to Pacific, and the Miraflores are the original set on the Pacific end). We got to see two boats pass through today, one from the fifth floor and one from the ground level. The observation deck was kind of a shit show. Lots of selfies and people filming the action… and it is slow going. Are you really going to make someone watch 15 minutes of a boat rising up in a lock in the canal that you filmed with your bobbing cell phone? It was crowded, babies crying, etc. We had a better experience on the ground floor. We bought a few coffees at the coffee shop and sat on a bench (i.e., let Tara put her foot up for a while) and we watched an empty container ship from China go through. There were only a few people around on the ground level viewing area, and a third of them were Panamanians in Panama hats. There were some Chinese men on the boat taking pictures of Miraflores while the people of Miraflores were taking pictures of them. After our boat viewings there was a very educational movie in a decent sized theater (shown in several different languages throughout the day). And there is also a multi-story set of exhibits that includes everything from how the locks were built to the biodiversity of the surrounding area.
I won’t give a history lesson, but there are four things worth sharing. First, the French started the whole thing first (in the 1880’s), but then gave up almost 10 years into the project. Then years later the USA stepped in and signed a treaty with Panama to give it another go, eventually finishing it in 1913 (bet you regret that one France!). Second, the lake in the middle of the three major locks is 26 meters above sea level; we both thought it was much less than that, so it really put the “engineering marvel” part of the story in perspective. Third, Panama didn’t get full control of the canal until 1999… Damn shame, but better late than never. And fourth, we both knew about the expansion project, but neither one of us knew they were building brand new locks in a new and different location, not expanding the existing locks. So Miraflores continues to have two functioning locks, and both are the same size and equipment as they have been for over 100 years. The new locks (opened in 2016) are to the west of the original locks, took almost 10 years to complete, and can accommodate 98% of the worlds boats. They are ~70 meters wider and 125 meters longer than the original locks, so those 15,000-18,000 TEU container ships can now pass through…. I do wish I could see one of those cross through the Panama Canal. The relationship between the Panama Canal and the design of container ships became very evident through the movie and exhibits and informational placards today (I love me some informational placards). Well done Miraflores - classy and educational. But please ease up on the plastic crap from China in your gift shop (as the irony there is so good it is bad).
Our second stop today was Casco Antiguo (or “Old Quarters”). So beautiful… and maybe a part of Panama City struggling to keep its identity?? Some of the oldest buildings in all of the American continents still stand in Casco Antiguo while Dorito trucks drive by in front of them to stock the local Mini-Super. The cathedral is being worked on so we didn’t get to go inside, but the other plazas, churches, theaters… lovely. Some of the buildings have corrugated tin barriers between the first and second floor; it took us a minute, but the barrier is to prevent crumbling bits of infrastructure from falling on unsuspecting pedestrians and cars below. If I wasn’t a hobbling gimp I am sure Ernie and I would have systematically walked every block to see every building. Lovely. On a particularly skinny calle we saw a sign for a “Taqueria”. We were both hungry but neither of us wanted to pay Casco Antiguo prices. How expensive could tacos be? Three dollars each apparently, but they were impressively delicious. After Ernesto finished his three, he ordered three more. They had two homemade salsas… I am sorry we did not ship all our loved ones a bottle of each.
Post-tacos we hop back on our double decker tourist bus back to where we started the day, and we commit to taking public transportation home. In part for the adventure, but also to get it figured out so that we can cheaply get to and from the city on Friday and Saturday. We had some information (from the internet) before we started, but the details are always the hard part. Yes, we know we need bus cards and can’t pay in cash. Yes, we know we can recharge the bus cards at bus stations, but where are the bus stations? There are no mass produced paper copies or website of stops and transit times. And where does one buy the cards to begin with, because you can’t buy them at bus stations - you can only recharge cards at bus stations (if in fact that kiosk works, which many don’t). Luckily with Ernie’s eagle eyes it was only about five blocks and 45 minutes of fumbling until we had a loaded bus card in our hands (we were in a very central part of Panama City). We also totally fumbled getting on the bus itself… you have to scan and then go through a turnstile and then pass the card to the other person, then they scan the card and go through turnstyle. Sounds easy enough except there are 25 Panamanians pushing and shoving to scan and go through the turnstyle during the 30 seconds the bus is stopped, so doing things in any sort of order is difficult. But whatever! We have figured it out, and tomorrow we can take the free shuttle to and from our hotel to the airport (and by shuttle they probably mean sitting in the back of a pickup truck, stay tuned), then take a $1.50 bus ride from the airport to double decker tourist town and/or whatever strikes our fancy.
This is all good news because this hotel… ugh. It is depressing. The TV is still broken (“Maybe tomorrow”, the woman at the desk said again today. I don’t think it has ever worked). We tried doing a little wifi in the lobby when we got back today but after 15 minutes of slow Apple rainbow wheels of death we became cranky. The green lobby room is so incredibly stifling. How can a room with windows and a door and a fan be that hot and stuffy??? When we looked at our pictures (mostly of the canal, but also a few I took of the hotel) Ernie said the lobby looks nicer in the picture than it does in person. And that tiled “thing” below the Panama sign and above the garbage can in our pictures? That is the pool. And Ernie just reminded me of their free breakfast this morning, as “breakfast included” was also on the list of hotel perks along with cable, wifi, pool, etc. The free breakfast was coffee and white toast. Like Wonder Bread white and Folgers brown. No toaster, but little packets of butter piled up like dominos. And everyone in the hotel (who are obviously cheap like us) piled in the hot and sweaty room trying to use the wifi while eating white bread and butter. Ugh.