STAY IN THE KNOW

Yesterday, I picked up Jaime Ford, the Vice Minister of Housing and Member of the Panamanian Presidential Cabinet, and his wife Patricia Villanueva Martinelli, from Atlanta-Hartsfield Jackson Airport. Still a little confused by how it took an hour to get through the airport and why you have to recheck your bags when arriving at the International Concourse, they were both excited to be arriving in Atlanta a few days before the forum, as neither had ever spent much time here. Asking about what they wanted to do, Patricia thought of what items she needed to purchase while she was stateside, but then remarked, “Globalization has ruined one of the best parts of traveling, Jimmy. It used to be exciting to go somewhere and think about what they had there that you couldn’t get anywhere else. Now, Panama has everything that every other city has and it is all the same no matter where you go.”

Jaime and Patricia have become good friends and counsel to both business and life in Panama. Patricia started as our real estate attorney at Morgan and Morgan, helping draft the contracts for the valley, where my father quickly came to appreciate her as one of Panama’s brightest and most diligent attorneys. After Jaime became Vice Minister of Housing, he immediately dove head first into tackling many of Panama’s toughest issues in housing, including a shortage of over 100,000 affordable homes and an outdated building code. He has been aggressively learning as much as he can about good urbanism and its possibilities for communities and strengthening the social needs of Panama, having attended his first Congress for New Urbanism last June, in Denver.

Dropping them at a hotel in Midtown for the weekend, so they could settle in before dinner, Jaime joked, “Seems like a walkable and urbanized location, Jimmy.” Returning a little before eight o’clock to pick them up for dinner, we cruised down to my wife and my favorite neighborhood, Virginia Highlands, which lays out as a series of three hamlets along Highland Avenue, with craftsman bungalows lining the street between clusters of shops and restaurants every quarter mile or so. Jaime and Patricia both attended college in the South, so when I threw out Thai, Pizza and Barbeque as dinner options, Jaime jumped on having ribs and we went to DBA Barbeque.

My partner, Kimberly Hall, and our friend from Panama, Jesse Levin, met us there for dinner. We first met Jesse in the cowboy entrepreneur crowd of Casco Viejo. He is from Connecticut and had put together a small Panama land investment fund at age 21 to purchase land near the small and charming town of Pedasi. Jesse is full of energy and seems to be addicted to tackling life’s greatest challenges. Aside from that, he is also the only man I know who stands up every time a woman comes or goes from the table… even when he’s eating barbeque. Jesse has come all the way to the forum from Haiti, where he has been working for the last three months as an emergency relief coordinator. You can find him quoted in the Wall Street Journal on occasion talking about Panama. He also doesn’t eat friend food. We seem to surround ourselves with people who constantly raise the bar far out of our reach.

Dinner was great, including everything from the ribs to the music and the locally brewed Terrapin Pale Ale, one of my favorites before I stopped drinking over a year ago. I still managed to steal a sip, but I am either not strong enough or, even sadder, I am getting too old to blend drinking with the work schedule required to try to build a village and make decisions that protect our investor’s commitment to Kalu Yala. After dinner it began to rain, so we opted out of walking the Highland to find a bar for another drink and instead went to Two Urban Licks.

Two Urban Licks is in an old warehouse compound nearby and taste making owner, Bob Amick, has turned the loading ramps into a port au couche, so no need to worry about rain. Everyone loved the high ceilings and cool industrial ambience, including Kimberly, who hasn’t lived in Atlanta since high school and therefore has just taken an interest in exploring all the cool, old in-town neighborhoods on her trips back from Panama. As we had left DBA, Patricia told me she wanted peaches since she was in Georgia, the Peach State. Then, sitting at the bar, she read that one of the house drinks, “Gone With the Wind”, was made with peach juice and we quickly had two, one for her and one for Kim. The live blues band was great and the diverse bar and restaurant patrons were clearly just getting started, but we all had a lot of work before the forum, so by eleven we decided to call it quits and I took everyone back to the hotel.

Well, that’s my thirty minutes of blogging for the day. Back to work.