Today we had our driver pick us up at 6:45 instead of 6:30. We made it to work around 7:05. Since we were a few minutes early and need someone to let us into the building (we are still waiting on our IDs), we decided to walk towards the canal to see how much we could see (since we realized yesterday just how close we were!). We were able to get within about 20 feet of the canal (no closer because there is LOTS of fencing). It was pretty cool :) (I failed and forgot my camera... sorry!) It looks just like the bank of the Merrimack River (and no wider!). If you didn't know what the Panama Canal was, you would never guess that GINORMOUS ships pass through there everyday. Straight across from where we were standing, we could see the construction of the third lock at the Miraflores Locks. It was pretty wild how much is going on over there. When we turned to the right, we could see the locks!!! They were pretty far away and hard to see but they were there! We are very excited to tour them (our sponsor is working on it).
At work it was very boring. We had lunch in the lunchroom today. We watched the news about the riots and protests in Colon. We can't understand the speakers because they talk so quickly but we could get the gist of the report based on the captions under the speaker. At one point, our sponsor turned to us and said "you need to leave early today" and when we asked him he told us that the demonstrations had made their way to Panama City and the traffic would be a nightmare and he would rather us get home in the daylight then at night. So Mario called our driver and we had our pickup moved forward an hour. We went back to our cubicle to finish somethings before leaving for the day. Then Roy (he works with us a lot because he is VERY fluent in English) came over to our cubicle and asked if we had heard anything. We told him that Urho wanted us to go home early. He said that he had been in the city earlier and that stuff was going down. He advised us to have our driver stop somewhere for dinner (somewhere safe!) and then to stay in our apartment for the night and keep our eyes on the news.
On the drive home, we noticed a much greater police presence everywhere. So far everything is good in our neighborhood so no worries!
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