Day 3! baking bread and clay

Hello everyone! It’s Yashiro-Rose and Stasia writing in from Panama!

Today, we visited two amazing places in La Arena: Lucrecio’s clay studio and Orlando’s family owned bakery. We were able to step into the culture and explore different career paths! Both of the options we explored uses hands-on learning & crafting.

First, we woke up bright and early at 6:30am, Anastasia and I got up about an hour before. Once everyone was awake we had a simple breakfast consisting of pancakes, toast, eggs, sausage, mango, and passion fruit juice. (ps. It was quite tasty).

After we finished, we jumped to our first destination! In around 45-50 minutes, we landed at Lucrecio’s clay studio. He told us about the history of his artisan work and how it related to his family as well as the culture in La Arena. We had the opportunity to paint our own pottery and even throw on the wheel!

We then took a short ride over to Orlando’s Bakery where we ate a Panamanian lunch: Chicken Chow-Mein, with ketchup (a traditional way of eating this dish), and Sancocho. Orlando told us about his ideals of entrepreneurship and how he intertwined his family and his passions. We unfortunately missed the window to make bread with Orlando’s wife, Yami, as they can begin preparation as early as 2 AM. (Yikes!) But, we had great dessert, got grind sugar cane, and meet their 6-month old puppy, Ellie.

We all watched the world cup on the bus ride home and ended off the day taking our first walking tour of the area around our hotel in Las Tablas (We had a short delay while we waited for Porter, Owen, and Sharon to wake up from their secret nap… yeah.. it was not secret!) We’re relaxing together as a group and getting ready to settle in for the night, I hope whoever is reading this has a good rest and we’ll see you tomorrow with an update from our two new Liders Del Dia.

Anastasia and Kelly pushing the machine to make sugar water.

Sincerely,

Leaders of the day, Anastasia and Yashiro-Rose 🙂 <3