Sunday in Santo Domingo

¡Hola!  Briefly, things are still going wonderfully in the DR.  The food is still delicious, I'm meeting lots of nice people, my Spanish is getting better, and everything is new and exciting.

The bus ride there.

On Sunday, I went on a day trip to Santo Domingo (the capital of the country) with the girls from my program and a few of the estudiantes de apoyo.  The estudiantes de apoyo are Dominican students who basically form a support group for international students at our university.  They're all super nice and have been joining us on a lot of our orientation activities.  I ended up sitting next to and talking to estudiantes de apoyo both on the way to and back from Santo Domingo, comparing favorite movies and books, gushing about how beautiful the mountains were, and exchanging cheesy Spanish and English jokes (They'd never heard "Why did the chicken cross the road?").

Here's a picture of the dog (for Katie).

When we got to Santo Domingo, the director of our program, an expert in Dominican history, gave us a tour of the old colonial town that was full of random, fascinating backstories.  She also brought her little dog, who was on a leash and walked the tour with us.  Here are some highlights of the city...

City Streets

A pretty white house.

Pretty colorful houses.

Most of the city of Santo Domingo is gorgeous - lots of old-style Spanish colonial architecture, houses painted bright purple or teal, and tropical flowers growing in little iron balconies.








Here and there were scattered the ruins of centuries-old monasteries - or, occasionally, the ruins of newer but abandoned houses that are now completely dilapidated.  For the most part, it was gorgeous. Here a few pictures of the streets, so you can get an idea of what the area looks like.



Basílica Catedral Santa María de la Encarnación

This facade has been taken apart & reassembled 4 times but still looks great.

During the early period of Spanish colonization, this was the basilica for all of the Americas.   Most of it remains in tact from the 1500s - apparently, the priests still use the same 500-year-old key to lock the doors.  In this picture, only the glass doors and statues of the apostles are (relatively) new.  When the Protestant English attacked Santo Domingo in the 1500 or 1600s, they sacked the church, burned everything that they could, and used it as a latrine.  Since it was stone, most of it survived (and got cleaned up), but the English general liked the statues of the apostles so much that he stole them and sent them back to England, where they remain to this day.

A very Rome-like construction story.

Over here is a picture of the bell tower, an example of the rather unorganized nature of the building process.  Columbus's son was originally in charge of building it, but after laying a foundation stone, he didn't arrange for anything else to be built, and the foundation just sat there.  A few years later, a bishop arrived from Spain, expecting to work at a grand cathedral, but he was greeted with...a huge empty space in the public square.

The construction of the bell tower was also problematic.  The person in charge of the project decided to build a gigantic, majestic structuring, thinking that it would be a good way to impress the Taíno Indians (who, having only had bells made of shells until the Europeans arrived, were fascinated by metal ones).  Halfway through the construction, though, a higher-up realized what he was doing, worried that a huge tower would make the city easier to find and attack, and put an end to the project.  It sat like that for centuries, with only the bottom level and no bells, until in the 1800s a rich family donated the money to add the tiny top that you see today.

There are great gargoyle faces on the fence.

The Alley of the Priests

This is a pretty pathway that leads into the courtyard that used to hold the priests' quarters and now is a quaint square full of palm trees, flowers, and fountains.  Here you can also see the rather shabby-looking but cheerful stray dog that accompanied us for most of the tour.





Casa Sacramento

This one has a strange story.  In the early colonial days, a young couple lived in this house.  On his way back from a trip to Africa, a merchant friend of the family gave them a baby orangutan, which they raised almost like a child.  It was very well-behaved - people would come from all over town to visit it and see it do tricks.  When, a year later, the couple had a baby boy, the orangutan treated it like it was its own little brother, cuddling it and playing with it gently.

Note the tower.

Until one day, being a wild animal, it had some strange wild animal instinct.  It grabbed the sleeping baby out of his crib and carried him to the top of this tower, dangling him by one foot over the edge.  People began calling out to the mother, and she ran to the street, where saw what was happening.  She fell to her knees and called out to Mary, saying that if she saved her son, their family would forever supply the church with bread and wine for communion.  Miraculously, the orangutan pulled the baby back up, cradled him in his arms, and put him back in his crib.  The mother kept true to her word - to this day, money from tours of the house goes to pay for the communion at the basilica. 

Now a popular spot to take wedding pictures.

Hospital San Nicolás

This was the hospital in the early years of the island, back when all of the doctors were priests.  They used it for centuries, until the walls started crumbling and threatening to injure more people than they were saving!  The residents of Santo  decided the ruins have a certain romantic look, so they've left them like this and a group goes through once a year to clear away debris and fortify things that looks dangerous.

Convento de Santa Clarita

Note the huge door and tiny windows to keep (most) boys out.

This was a convent of the order of St. Clare.  Back in the colonial days, most of the elites would send their daughters there to recieve an education and be kept away from boys until a proper husband could be found.  There was, however, a scandal that a new priest, just arrived from Spain, discovered.  He was introduced to all of the rich and important people of the island, including one of two judges on the Supreme Court equivalent of all of Spanish Colonial America.  This judge, being a total sleaze, soon started talking about the convent and said something to the effect of "You wouldn't believe how many young virgins there I've gotten with *wink wink, nudge nudge.*"  The priest was horrified and tried to get someone to do something about it, but everyone on the island kept telling him that, because the judge was so powerful, they just let him get away with whatever he wanted.  The priest was outraged by their apathy, and his bishop soon decided that he was causing so much trouble that he sent him back to Spain.

This guy.

In Spain, he tried again to appeal to the authorities, but no one would do anything that might put them in the bad graces of the judge.  His bishop in Spain, however, wanted to help, and so gave the priest a year off to write about the scandal.  He had to change the details, but he hoped that if the book was popular enough, people would make the connection and it would generate a public outcry against the judge.  There isn't really any information on whether the second part of the plan worked, but the story was indeed popular: It was, in fact, Don Juan, of the phrase "don Juan" and countless remakes of the story over the centuries.

The Beach

It looks pretty from here...

...but there's a lot of trash.

The beach in Santo Domingo isn't that nice - it's polluted and no one swims there.  After lunch, though, we walked down there anyway and I did dip my toes in, making Santo Domingo the farthest south I've ever touched the ocean.
 
Helados Italianos

So happy to be out of the heat!

This wasn't exactly gelatto (what I had was a distinctly Dominican-style sherbet made with "grapes of the sea" - some kind of very tasty purple tropical fruit), but it was very delicious and very refreshing on a such hot and humid day.  Because Santo Domingo is on the coast, it's much hotter than Santiago and on Sunday, it must have been in the high 80s (in January!).  The owner of this shop kindly unlocked the doors and let us inside so we could sit in the shade, even though it was during siesta and he was actually closed.  Dominicans are so hospitable!

Ingenio Boca de Nigua 

Half of it has been restored, and half left as it was.

After lunch, we left Santo Domingo and drove for half an hour through tiny towns full of fruit stands, grazing horses, beauty salons, and tiny shops where you could pay by the minute to use a computer connected to the internet.  We eventually turned down an unmarked, slopping gravel road (a bit scary in bus!) to the ruins of the most important sugar plantation in the DR, although there were no signs marking the spot or telling visitors know about its history.  While our director gave us another tour, a Dominican mother and her two daughters stopped to listen to her, saying that even though they'd lived in the area their whole lives, they'd never know most of what she was saying.

The emancipation was announced in this courtyard.

But this was the site of the first slave rebellion in Colonial America, and, two centuries later, another rebellion of over 200 slaves that was very influential in bringing about emancipation.  Moreover in 1801, in this exact plantation, the Haitian leader who was in the process of invading the DR declared that all slaves in the country were free - and, even after the Haitians left, slavery never returned to the island.

Imagine the heat.

It was a very eerie place - it was very quiet and felt almost haunted.  Our director showed us where each of the stages of sugar production took place.  Most of it involved working 12 to 14 hour shifts standing over roaring fires (in an already miserably hot country), pouring and stirring and crushing huge amounts of sugar cane, and a lot of it took place next to dangerous machinery that frequently took people's arms and legs off, especially towards the ends of long shifts.

On the left, you can see where slaves would stand over gigantic copper pots filled with sugar cane juice, stirring it constantly until it started to crystallize, at which point they hoisted the pots up and poured the sugar into cones to dry.  Underneath, other slaves had to keep the fires going constantly, and they were often chained there because it was such a terrible job that a lot of them tried to run away.  It was apparently one of the worst kinds of slavery, and slaves picking cotton in the U.S. were often terrified of getting sold to the plantations in the Caribbean.

That was kind of a downer to end on, but since this has been such a long post, I'm sure you're ready to be done reading.  (I'll try to make it shorter next time!)  I miss you all!