My name is Joey Bonura and I am studying in Panama city, Panamá for about a year. I have already been here for about 2 and a half months and I have been having a great time. I am staying with the family of a Panamanian friend that I met at U of L and they have been really welcoming.  I also brought my dog Riley with me since I am going to be gone for so long I couldn’t leave him at home.  I am doing an internship at Philips as well as taking four business classes that I can apply towards my marketing degree. I really like the school I am going to because the class sizes are really small (about 13 people per a class) so the individual attention makes learning the material easier. At my internship I do a lot of research on market predictions for some of the different categories at Philips. Doing research for data in central america is a lot more difficult than other places because many of the countries are still developing. Panama is a great place to be studying business right now. The are so many construction projects going on and the city currently has about 150 skyscrapers. During my first week here Donald Trump held the inauguration of his first international hotel. The building is in the shape of a sail and currently the tallest building in Central America. The city also has a historic district called Casco Viejo that had Spanish colonial architecture and good cafes and restaurants to go. There is a track on the waterfront that I like to run on and it goes from the city to Casco Viejo. The beach is about an hour and a half from the city so I’ve been able to go there a few weekends to relax.

Since I have been here I created a website for students traveling to Panama because I noticed there wasn’t very much information on the internet. If you want to check it out you can go to www.panamastudentguide.com.

Also, a tip to everyone who is studying abroad and wants to save on foreign transaction fees: Capital One doesn’t charge any fees for foreign transactions so you can have a debit card and use it freely without having to worry about converting money or paying the high fees that banks charge. Panama only uses US dollars but my bank was still charging a foreign transaction fee which was $6 so I did some research and found that Capital One is one of the only companies that doesn’t charge any fees, so I set up an online checking account with them and it actually works.

I will try to be more consistant with my posts on here and keep everyone updated on new things that happen. If anyone has a twitter account and wants to follow me you can go to twitter.com/joeybonura. Its a lot easier for me to post updates on there because i can do it straight from my phone.