DAYLIFE

Shopping, for a start: everything from bond issues to boa constrictors is on sale here. Panama receives visitors from the world around, and sells products from the world around, many at duty-free prices. Somewhere along the line, a tourist is going to find himself wondering why he came all this way to buy something from the old home town.After shopping: tours. First and foremost,  see the Canal. To visit Panama without taking in the Canal would be like visiting Niagara without seeing the Falls.

NIGHTLIFE

Casinos, restaurants, discotheques, bars and floorshows.  The rhythm of tropic tamborito now has competition as Panama's night sound from the carillon-pealing of slot machines. There are restaurants of dozens of culinary allegiances. You can even choose between Peking, Tokyo or Seoul.

DUSKLIFE AND DAWNLIFE

For dusklife, the ritual of ancient antimalarial precautions. On the rocks. Malaria was eliminated from Panama two generations ago. Do not tell your barman. Dawnlife consists of (a) the bustle of the market at Salsipuedes with its crowded wharves and produce boats from the interior and (b) tourists trying to remember where they parked their hotel.

PEOPLE

Panama has been called a melting pot, but actually it is a sancocho pot. As in the local dish, all the ingredients are in there contributing their own flavour, but keeping their own identity in the process. Here is a Central Avenue sampling of ingredients:

Criollos, Iberian-descended Panamanians, as proud of their ancestry as New Englanders are flattered at being called English.

Mestizos, the Criollo-Indian blend that is the non-silent majority in most of Latin America. Blacks whose fathers signed on in the then-British  West Indies to dig the Canal.The blonde wife and kid of an American businessman; Central Avenue shopkeepers from India; Korean crewmen off a Balboa-berthed tunaboat; Blacks descended from freed or escaped slaves (Cimarrones); South American shoppers; Choco Indians from the Darien; a Panama Canal  pilot; Japanese bankers; merchants with Central European origins, whose family may have found refuge from Hitler's persecution; French sailors with  red pompoms  on their hats; San Blas Indians, the women still in their island costume; a cruise ship gaggle looking for bargains.

This sancocho of people is the speciality of the house only in Panama City . Travel to the Interior, which in practice means anywhere beyond about five miles from the Canal in the direction of Costa Rica, and you will be in a land of Criollos and Mestizos.