If you’re in Panama City, it’s easy to get by on just English. The more urban the area, the more English that is spoken. Panama is a Spanish-speaking country, so the formal language is Spanish.
Being in Panama and not knowing Spanish is just like being in Arizona and having people working for me there who have been in the United States for 25 years but didn’t speak English. To me, that’s an atrocity. My Spanish isn’t great, but it’s certainly serviceable, and I get by pretty well. I don’t speak it correctly or conjugate perfectly, but it’s important that you speak the native language.
In general, people here in Panama don’t really mind that you’re butchering their language. They are actually happy that you’re trying, and it’s a real door opener. They’ll tell you, “Wow, you speak Spanish, so you’re not a gringo.”
The closest area for a large city where I live is David. David has an international airport, etc. I go to David for certain things. Invariably, if you go up from David, you’ll see Boquete on one side of the mountain, and Volcán on the other side . If you go further for another 25-30 minutes, you’ll reach the Costa Rican border.
I went into a store in David, and since I’m obviously a gringo at 6’2” tall with white hair, the locals said, “Ah, you live in Boquete.” I told them I didn’t live in Boquete, and that not every gringo lives in Boquete. I told them, “I’m a Panamanian. I grow plantains and bananas, and I have pigs.” And they said, “Great! You’re not a foreigner. You’re one of us.”
It makes a world of difference if you can stumble through some Spanish and break that stereotype in which everybody thinks that every person who lives in this area who’s white lives in a gated community in Boquete and has servants. I’m not that kind of person and I don’t want to be a part of that stereotype. That stereotype is really not well received here in Panama, and if you can get out of that stereotype and be one of the locals, your life will get so much easier.
(Organic garden of Finca Cazador, near Volcan, Panama, pictured.)
It is probably unsafe to drink the water from the taps in Chapala and Ajijic. Most people here, even the locals, drink bottled water. It is not recommended to drink the water coming from the lake, either. However, people do brush their teeth using tap water. When you do that, eventually, people tend to colonize their digestive tracks with the local flora and they turn out to be okay. 
To have a Portuguese Passport it will be necessary to apply for Portuguese Nationality first. 
Average people pay around Belize $40 per day (US $20) for a gardener here in Placencia. (That's a picture of our place to the right.) 
Learning about permanent residency, and obtaining permission to stay in the country. Rules change all the time. Don't assume anything. Regardless of the cost, a good legal counselor is a must. Also, make sure the documents you'll need are in order before you leave home. It can be an expensive trip back to acquire them. Plus, understand the rules in place about those documents. How long are they good for? Is a notary seal sufficient, or do they need an apostille? How many copies, and...
Up until recently and for the last nine years or so I’ve been here, there has been a predominance fairly low cost $5 to $6 stands and restaurants all along the beach that are quite similar to one another. In the last 12 months, however, we’ve had a couple of much higher end, more internationally flavored restaurant. We have G&G Gourmet which is fantastic at around $12 to $15 for a plate and then there is the Cervezaria which was opened by American guys, that does....jpg)
Given that our planned drive from Puebla to Orizaba was only a little more than three hours, that our combination Puebla hotel / restaurant / fraccionamiento was so pleasant, and that the restaurant had an all you can eat Mexican buffet breakfast, we saw no compelling reason to refuse the beautifully arranged food we found so temptingly arranged before us. Even in this upscale restaurant with impeccable service and sophisticated ambiance, they allowed us to dine...
When starting from where we stayed in our planned community in the agricultural countryside (“campo”), we would drive into the center (centro) of San Miguel de Allende in one of two ways, depending on whether we wanted to enter from the north or from the southwest.