Operation Panama City Complete
Hey,
So after a rather uneventful day of riding, just 64 km along a divided, busy 4 lane highway, ignore the people at the toll booths and keep on riding.
When we reached the bridge over the canal we were stopped by security. ‘For our own safety’ we had to wait for a little pick-up truck and jam our stuff into the back of it for a ride across the bridge.
The hostel here is an odd deal, it is the 3 and 8th floors of an apartment building down town. Not really your classic hostel environment, but classic to the area there is only cold water, and for the first 4h of our stay that was not working.
Power goes out in the shopping Mall, but things continue on, as usual, except that you cannot tell if you are going to bump into another person, or a display of onions. I decide that this is the perfect opportunity to get the two wisdom teeth out on my left side, and set off to find a dentist.
Because of the city nature of things, standard dress code is unfortunately not flipflops and shorts. Anyhow my shirt wearing self is inspected, X-rayed, and the dental surgeon is called in from his day off. He is Cedric the Entainer down the the goatee, except that he does not speak english. Luckily I know the spanish words abierto and cerrado. He informs me that the top tooth will be easy and the bottom one hard…..
So the top one took 5 minutes, which he popped out during an intermission in the 2 hour session which was the removal of the bottom tooth. I learned the spanish phrase for ‘bleeding lots’. It turned out that Cedric knew the english phrase ‘pain or pressure’. When he humored me for the first few times with a little more freezing before ‘we will break tooth’.
‘Cederic, I would like to just stop and go home now’.
Answer: Yes this is fine
After 2 more rounds of drilling, and torqueing with a pipe wrench (which my tooth won - damned fluoride) which my tooth won, he realized that breaking was not happening.
By the time the dust settled (the blood would not stop flowing until today)the whole office had packed up and gone home, lights out. I was not sure if I wanted to hug him or punch him. Here is a perscription for extra strength tylenol.
Well I guess I have knocked a few grams off for the climbs this season.
