Hotel Marparaiso in Panama City

I found Hotel Marparaiso on the web. It looked friendly enough, as friendly as any city hotel can look on the Internet, and for $33 a night I decided to take the chance.
This seven-story, yellow building with Hotel Marparaiso painted in red on its side, rests at the corner of Avenida Cuba and Calle 34, just two blocks from the waterfront, but not a very picturesque waterfront.
The girl who checked us in spoke English, explaining what time breakfast was available in the adjacent restaurant as well as providing us with remotes for our room air-conditioner and TV.
The hotel’s website says it offers secured parking for up to 50 cars but when we asked she said parking on the street was fine. All we could do was cross our fingers and hope that our car survived the night.
We headed up to #108 with our funny looking key and found two beds (one twin, one double), a private bath with a hot-water shower, and a TV mounted in the corner. It was almost hospital-like with its drab white walls and white tile floors, but it was clean and had a large window overlooking the city streets. Plus there was a deadbolt on the door.

Knowing the parents were worried, we immediately headed back downstairs to use the computer. A small room off the lobby has three computers where you just insert a dollar and get one hour of Internet usage. We emailed everyone letting them know we had arrived safely at our hotel and that the city was well … just that, a city.
We spent the evening watching “Die Hard” in English with Spanish subtitles. Very funny!
After a few hours, it became apparent that our air-conditioner was leaking so we expressed our concern to the girl at the front desk who hollered (literally) for the maintenance guy. He immediately came up to our room, inspected the unit, and, for a temporary solution, placed a bucket underneath it. He also gave us fresh towels since we had used ours to soak up the water on the floor. We were impressed with the quick attention. We grabbed a quick bite in the restaurant downstairs, which was empty for the most part but take-out orders were flying out the door. The menu was at least 10 pages long. It was huge! We split a club sandwich and called it a night.
The next morning we headed back down the restaurant to claim our free breakfast with our two poker chips given to us during check-in. The two poker chips entitled us to two rolls each (not heated) with butter and grape jelly, a small glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice, and coffee with milk. We were there when they opened at 7:30 a.m., took our free meal, and checked out.
More importantly, we were happy to find our little Lancer, still in one piece, waiting for us just outside.