Apprenti Trips
Our Story
When I was eleven, my dad told me about a fantasy he had. Not a travel fantasy, a life fantasy. He wanted, for just one month, to do a completely different job every single day. One day a boat captain in San Blas. One day a gas station attendant. One day a raspadero, shaving ice in the Panama heat. One day a taxi driver. I asked him why, and he said something I've never forgotten: he wanted to know what it actually felt like to live someone else's day.
That idea landed somewhere deep. Because I already knew the feeling he was describing. I'd been living with a version of it since I was small. As a child, I used to get frustrated, genuinely frustrated, that I couldn't stop being me. I wanted to know what it felt like to be someone else. To see through different eyes. To inhabit a different mind, even briefly. Over time, that restlessness transformed into something softer, into empathy, into curiosity. But the hunger for perspective never really left. So when my dad described his fantasy, it didn't just sound interesting. It resonated in a way I couldn't shake.
That idea stayed with me for fifteen years. It sat quietly in the back of my mind the way certain things do, not urgent, not actionable, just there. Present. Until one January morning in 2015, when I was walking through the stone archways of Casco Antiguo and I decided I couldn't let it stay there any longer.
Something that stays in your thoughts that often can't just stay there. It'll drive you mad.
So I walked up to a raspadero, a vendor who hand-shaves ice into a paper cup and douses it in tropical fruit syrups and condensed milk, a Panamanian staple as ordinary and beloved as an ice cream truck, and asked if I could work alongside him for a day. He stood every day under a majestic tree at Plaza de Francia. He was skeptical. I convinced him anyway.
His name was Sr. Julio, though he didn't give that up easily. He called himself el Viejo Talentoso. He arrived in his custom-built cart, nicknamed the Mercedes Va, blasting música típica at full volume, Panamanian flags rippling in the wind. He'd wanted to be a sailor once. Life had other plans. So he built his cart from scratch instead: every compartment designed to his exact specification, wheels built to last, radio included. He'd spent so many years watching people walk up and order a raspao that he believed he could read anyone. He spoke broken English to the Americans, broken Portuguese to the Brazilians, broken French to the French. He was entirely, brilliantly himself.
I worked from ten-thirty in the morning until four in the afternoon. And somewhere in those hours, shaving ice, listening to him talk, watching tourists circle the plaza and finally give in to something cold and sweet, I understood what my dad had been talking about all those years ago. You learn things from the inside that you simply cannot learn from the outside. You see a life that was invisible to you before. You come away changed.
It was, possibly, the longest stretch of pure happiness I had ever felt.
I called that project De Cuara en Cuara, a Panamanian expression meaning coin by coin, step by step. The idea was to try a new trade or profession each week: one day a fisherman, one day a painter, one day a mechanic. To live, briefly, from the inside of lives that most of us only ever observe from the outside.
That was ten years ago. The project never became a business. But the idea never left me either.
Apprenti Trips is where it finally lands. It's what happens when you take that feeling, the feeling of stepping into a world that isn't yours and seeing it from the inside, and build a real, structured, carefully designed experience around it. Not a tour. Not a class. Not a sightseeing package. A multi-day immersion where you temporarily enter the life of a craft, a profession, a place, a way of being. Where you work alongside real people, in real conditions, and come home with something that's genuinely hard to explain but impossible to forget.
The trips are designed for people who want perspective more than entertainment. Who are drawn to depth over breadth. Who have always been a little curious about the lives they see from the outside and finally want to understand one from within.
My dad had a fantasy. I turned it into a project. Now I'm turning it into a trip you can actually take.
Welcome to Apprenti.