How do pay a parking ticket in Panama City?



Posted: Monday, March 09, 2009

by Michael Price
Panama Investment Vacations

The other day I had the misfortune to collect a parking ticket in Panama City . My Spanish is not the greatest but even I could see that the ticket was short of basic information such as the amount of the fine and the date that it had to be paid by. However on the back of the ticket was a list of five offices where the fine could be collected but one of the more intriguing parts of Panama City is the complete lack of street signage so no-one ever gets to know the name of the street they are walking along.

Upon examination of the ticket I discovered that one of the municipality offices for payment was on Via Espana. This fine boulevard is Panama City's equivalent of Broadway, Oxford Street and The Champs Elysees and runs for many miles. As the city has developed, a major central part of the thoroughfare has been turned into a east to west Una Via' but unfortunately the journey in the other direction is much less of a direct route.

I plumped for the Via Espana payment office and woke up the condo security guard from his lunchtime slumber to ask him directions. He wafted an arm and said alle' (over there) in the direction against the flow of traffic. At this point I decided to walk as driving against the traffic is difficult even with a satellite navigation system because it was not clear where the destination is anyway.

Luckily at the time there was a delivery man nearby who could string together a sentence or two (in Spanish) and I asked him how long it would take to walk. Now Panamanians don't even like walking to the toilet so when he wrote down 45 minutes he had a wry grin on his face.

Having said that, I was unperturbed. Most Panamanian have never walked for 45 minutes in their lifetime. So I set off, head down in the midday sun, thinking it was around the corner. After 15 minutes I asked a lady at a bus stop and she could only utter the words take a taxi', another 15 minutes later a rather overweight gentleman responded with alle, alle' to the same question.

I have to say that I was getting rather hot and sticky in my long trousers (it is not allowed to wear sleeveless tee-shirts or shorts into Panamanian official buildings) when I approached a third person at a roadside caf. I wiped off the sweat and tried to look as if I had just stepped out of an air conditioned car and asked him for directions after a short while, I am nor sure if this was because no-one had ever paid a parking fine in Panama before, he pointed at a church just up the road and said arriba'.

I arrived at the municipality building exactly 45 minutes after I had left home sweating like a horse that had just run the Grand National to find a queue 20 meters long (not to pay parking tickets I may add).

Needless to say after a one hour wait to pay my fine I took a taxi home in the easy direction, however, taxis are to be shared in Panama and the route was not as direct as I may have hoped, but that is another story.

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