My Walk to School

Today, I will be leading you on a tour of my neighborhood and, more specifically, the ten-minute-long walk to school I take every day.  While it is not necessarily the most scenic of routes, I believe it will be one of the things I miss most about the country.  It's just been so wonderful to get to know the same people and places by passing them every day for four months, to see how they've changed over time, and to always be surprised by new, random occurrences!

So, we'll start our tour here, by the front door of my apartment, with the small patch of shrubs that my host mom grows next to it.

After we leave the parking lot of my apartment building, this food stand is the first thing we pass.  It's closed for most of the day, but around six in the afternoon the people who run it start setting up shop by putting chickens to roast over charcoal in the red box and pulling plastic chairs alongside it to peel plantains for frying later on in the evening.


Grossly close to the food stand are these dumpsters (For perspective: I think I stood in exactly the same place for both the last picture and this one, just turning around to the other direction).  Sometimes, these dumpsters are emptied and the heap of overflow garbage is swept up and this looks like a normal sidewalk (albeit with a few more banana peels, shreds of old rags, and Oreo wrappers stuck to the ground than most).  But once or twice a week, the trash piles up for two or three days at a time and forms a mountain four feet tall and twenty feet long - from before the edge of the first dumpster to beyond the edge of the third one.  As this is a hot, humid country in the middle of the Caribbean, this is even grosser than it would be in, say, Minnesota, because the trash starts to rot and reek almost as soon as it's thrown on top of the heap.  On the plus side, I've gotten really good at holding my breath while striding very quickly past it, which I imagine must be great exercise for my lungs.


Next, we come to the motoconcho stand.  At any given moment, there are at least a few men under the red awning, sitting on their motorcycles or driving them around in circles, offering to drive you anywhere in the city for around 20 pesos (50 cents).  Since motoconcho are generally only safe in smaller towns, I have never taken one of them in Santiago.  I have, however, received numerous marriage proposals from the drivers, generally with such romantic and charming lines as "Oye, mujer!  Cásate conmigo y dame la visa!" ("Hey, woman!  Marry me and give me a visa!").  

Cultural note:  Lines like that are called piropos, and are a large part of, well, any experience any time any woman in the country leaves her house to go anywhere.  They're usually called out from a respectful distance and sometimes they're a little funny or sweet, but they do get old.  Examples of typical piropos include: "Psst!  Psst!"..."Hola, bonita! (Hello beautiful!)"...The classic cat-call whistle..."Que Dios te bendiga (God bless you)"..."Rubia rubia!/Morena morena!/Negrita negrita! (Girl with light/medium/dark skin, respectively)"...and, if you look like you speak English, "Baby, I love you!  I love you!" in the super thick accent of someone whose knowledge of that language consists only of that phrase.

Moving on, we come to the smiley and frequently tipsy man who sells the staple vegetables of the Dominican diet - plantains, yucca, potatoes, tomatoes, and peppers - off of a tarp on the sidewalk.

And, across the street, there is this woman selling cigarettes, candy (including the beloved Halls cough drops), and coffee.  While I have never bought anything here, I was once in a concho whose driver pulled up alongside the stand and asked the woman for a cup of coffee (served out of a large thermos into a tiny plastic cup, just barely bigger than the ones that come on the top of liquid medicines so you can measure your dosage) and one cigarette (which she pulled out of a brand-new pack for him, to sell the rest one at a time or all at once at a slightly reduced rate).

Moving along, we come to the newly built car repair/wash station.  When I got here, this was just a layer of concrete with a few holes in the ground - now, it's a fully functional auto tune-up place trying to drum up business with all kinds of deals, like a free car wash with every oil change.  So next time you're in town and need an oil change, you know where to go.

Next, we come to the bridge, a place I have very mixed feelings about.  We'll start with this side of the bridge, as it's the one I use most of the time.  As you can see, it's not the best-maintained.  Not only is there this graffiti, but, behind that yellow wall...

...there's a large, frequently smelly pile of plastic cups, napkins, and grocery bags.

Once you get past that, though, you get this incredible view of a valley, a river, and a set of bright green plantain trees.  Except for the gas station in the upper right corner, it looks like something out of National Geographic - and I get to walk past and admire it every single day.



There are also these plants, which I'm rather fond of.  I've only ever seen them grow under this pipe on this bridge, so I'm not sure what they're called, but they're quite unusual.  They're a grayish-purpleish color and are made of thick trunks with pointy leaves growing out in a circle.  These two are pretty straight, but some of them grow out to the side at weird angles.  Up until last week, there was one that was very low-to-the ground and grew almost horizontally, with a bend in the middle.  Every time I saw it out of the corner of my eye, my heart skipped for a second, thinking it was a snake.



The the other side of the street, even though it's technically the exact same bridge, is really different.  It, too, has a nice view from some angles - here, you can look out and see the huge monument that's the center of the city of Santiago.











But it also houses one of the city's poor barrios, filled with tiny one- or two-room cement shacks topped with tin roofs with holes in them.  The houses are built one next to the other wherever there's space, so there are sometimes nothing except foot paths leading up to them and, while a lot of them get electricity and water occasionally, those services are quite unreliable.  There also isn't a garbage pick up for that neighborhood, so, as you can see on the left, a lot of it just ends up getting thrown down the side of the hill.


This is the general store at the edge of the bridge, pieced together with a lot of tin, but selling a surprisingly wide variety of things, from tires to plastic kids toys.









Past the bridge comes a very different, solidly middle class area of town, with significantly less garbage on the streets and more far more chain stores.  Here, we see the signs for PriceSmart and Payless...

...and a little later we come to the nicely air conditioned strip mall with Cecomisa (the primer computer repair shop in the country) and at least three separate Dominican banks.








In between them is what is probably my favorite part of the walk - the fruit stand.  Every day, on the back of his pick-up, this man lays out huge piles of fruits: bananas, pineapples, oranges, papayas, and, now that they've just started to come into season, mangoes.  Because of all the citrus, it smells wonderful.  It's also one of the more happening parts of the walk - every morning, the vendor sets out six or seven plastic chairs on the sidewalk alongside his truck, so that after buying their fruit, people can sit down, eat it, chat with each other, and (of course) call out piropos to women passing by.

This is my second favorite part of the walk.  Every day, from eight in the morning to six at night, either the man in the white shirt and/or his brother are here, selling gorgeous flowers of all kinds - daisies, roses, birds of paradise - out of old paint buckets.  I think, at some point or another, I've walked past every single stage of the operation, from setting up the paint buckets in the early morning to trimming the bottoms of the stems at midday to pouring water over them to keep them looking fresh in the afternoon to moving the more sensitive types of flowers from one part of the sidewalk to another to keep them in the shade as the sun moves across the sky.

And, just a few yards past the flowers, we arrive at Puerta Dos (Gate 2) of my university, la Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra!  Were this a real walk, it's likely you now would have walked for fifteen minutes at a normal pace (ten at an "oh shoot I'm going to be late for class" one), would be feeling your shirt start to stick to your back with sweat, and would probably have gotten at least three piropos (if you're a woman).

Food: A Very Special Dessert Edition

Dominicans love sweet food.  There are vendors selling gum and candy on every street corner.  People put, on average, two to three heaping tablespoons of sugar in every half-full cup of coffee, drink fruit juices with plenty of added sweetener at every meal, and think we're crazy for drinking plain chamomile tea at night.  (My friend's host brother, in fact, once snuck some honey into her tea behind her back because he was so sure it'd be gross without it.)  Two of the most popular snacks are Oreos and their Dominican counterpart, Dinos.  One would think that this love of all things sweetened would translate into a delicious selection of Dominican desserts.  Let's test that hypothesis...

Higos

These are stewed figs.  (The photo is actually from Google, but the ones I ate looked just like this.)  This was the first dessert I had in this country, as it is the favorite food of my host brother who was visiting for Christmas and New Year's.  My host mom makes it by putting figs, water, and sugar together in a saucepan and simmering them until they get mushy and dense.

The verdict: This can only be described as sickly sweet.  When my host mom tried to make them again a few days later but burned them, she and Braulio were disappointed.  I tried to express my condolences tactfully, but, secretly, my taste buds were rejoicing that they would be sparred from having to eat any more of them to be polite.  

Dulce de Leche y Coco

This is a Dominican candy sold both in grocery stores and on street corners, wrapped in plastic, ready to be sliced and eaten.  This one is plain milk and coconut, but some of them come with a fruit-jelly-like filling.

The verdict: This is nothing like the caramel-like dulce de leche that comes from Argentina.  Instead, it has the consistency of a slightly drier, grainier fudge, and none of the deliciousness.  It's possibly the most bland candy I've ever eaten - it's not sickly sweet, but it's also not sweet, period.  Nor can I describe it as having any other flavor.  It doesn't even taste like coconut.

[As a side note, the other most popular options in the candy aisle of Dominican grocery stores are suckers (which are generally good), Halls cough drops (which are enormously popular and eaten as mints), gum (lots of Orbit and Trident), and circus peanuts (which, for some reason, seem to be the most popular kind of imported candy.  Every grocery store I've been to has had racks and racks of them for sale.).   

The verdict:  The most popular candies include cough drops and circus peanuts.  Enough said.]

Arroz con Leche

This is like a slightly more soupy version rice pudding - rice cooked with milk, sugar, vanilla, raisins, and a cinnamon stick, then sprinkled with a dash of powdered cinnamon.

The verdict:  Very, very tasty.  Probably the best dessert in the country. 

Bubble Tea

A few weeks ago, I was in a mall, walking around the food court, when I suddenly came face to face with a sign with a picture of bubble tea.  My heart soared.  Never, in my wildest dreams, had I imagined I would find bubble tea in Santiago.  (Although, fun fact:  The tapioca pearls in bubble tea are actually made out of...the starch of yuca, after it's been grated and had the liquid pressed out of it.)  I ordered one right away, and you can see the joy and excitement in my face as I wait for it.  There was a lot of joy and excitement.

The verdict: Heartbreak.  As Joe pointed out, I was a fool to suspect that Dominicans, who make stir fry with raisins, would make a good Asian drink.  The pearls were not the sweet, round, chewy delights from Tea Garden - they were a bitter, squishy mass of grossness.  The actual tea part was quite good, but I couldn't drink it without getting more of those bitter chunks of tapioca, so the drink as a whole was heartbreakingly awful.

Honeycomb

Someone gave my host mom this all-natural, straight-from-the-country honeycomb as a gift.  It was just a huge slab of wax dripping with fresh honey, and we kept it in our fridge for about a week.  Any time you wanted a little bit of something sweet, you could just cut yourself off a piece, chew it so the honey would ooze out, and spit out the wax that remained (kind of like those wax bottle candies).  

The verdict: I actually liked this a lot.  The honey was delicious.  The only bad part was that sometimes little pieces of crumbly wax would get stuck behind your teeth, like popcorn kernels.

Habichuelas con Dulce

You make this concoction by blending beans with milk, cinnamon, and sugar until it's a smooth, brownish liquid.  You then add some chopped up pieces of batatas (those blueish sweet potatoes) and let it simmer.  Yep.  It's a dessert whose main ingredients are sweet potatoes and beans.

The verdict: I think it's no coincidence that this is almost always made during Lent, the time of fasting and self-denial.

So, while I'm sure I'll end up missing some of the foods here, like passion fruit and mangú, I can't say I'll miss a lot in the way of Dominican sweets.

Santo Cerro

My study abroad program, being, perhaps, the best study abroad program in the history of study abroad programs, takes us on an extraordinary amount of field trips.  Partially, this is because travel is easier in the Dominican Republic than, say, Spain, so our tuition stretches farther, and partially, this is because our program directors like having an excuse to visit beautiful beaches and interesting historical sites, so they just arrange more excursions than the directors of, well, pretty much any other CIEE program.  These are a bit delayed as I am just now getting my pictures in order, but here is the first of several posts about the trips we've taken in the past month and a half...So, without further ado, I present our visit to the Santo Cerro (aka, the Holy Hill).

This hill, located about 30 minutes southeast of Santiago, was the site of the first large-scale battle between Europeans and American Indians.  Now, it houses the main street of a small town just a little way off the main highway connecting the country's major cities.  Most of the street looks like pretty much any other road in a small Dominican town - full of tiny, slightly run-down general stores, cafeterias, and houses, all with groups of people sitting around and shooting the breeze in front of them.  At the very end of the street, though, there is a pretty pastel church with a breathtaking view of the tree-covered slope of the hill and the gigantic green valley below.

Back in March 1495, the churchyard was the site of a newly-built Spanish fortress, and the valley was the site of the first major battle between American Indians and Europeans.  By that time, the Spaniards had explored a good deal of the island and were beginning to really anger the local people.  Not only were they making excessive demands for gold and food and causing a lot of trouble with the local women, but recently they'd made a few other especially pushy moves.

Columbus had, for example, tricked the Taíno chief who had killed the original 39 men he'd left on the island (see a few posts back) by telling him he wanted to negociate a truce, but actually handcuffing him and throwing him into jail until he could be brought to Spain for trial.  One of the Spanish generals had ordered his men to cut off the ears of a Taíno nobleman they'd accused of stealing their food.  This angered the Taínos a lot as, in the first place, the general had no authority in their eyes to punish anyone and, in the second place, they lived in a society where villages kept and shared all of their food in common, so they didn't understand what the man had supposedly done wrong.  Not to mention the fact that, you know, different groups of Spaniards had stolen plenty of food from various Taíno villages over the past few years.

After a while, though, things got so heated that Columbus decided he needed to show the Taínos who was boss.  He ordered a palisade to be built on the top of a hill overlooking a huge valley, close to one of the biggest and most rebellious Taíno towns.  Soon, both sides gathered for battle - about 220 Spaniards and 1,000 of their indigenous allies on top of the hill, about 30,000 of their indigenous enemies on the bottom of the hill.  The armored Spaniards, with their metal swords, crossbows, and hand cannons, believed that they were in decent shape against the naked Taíno's wooden lances and arrows with bone tips.  In reality, though, they were hopelessly outnumbered.  By the end of the day, the Taínos had beaten the Spanish all the way back up the hill and invaded their palisade.

Supposedly, the Taínos then tried three times to destroy the cross that the Spaniards had built inside their fortress - by burning it, pulling it down, and chopping it up - but were unable to hurt it.  Lynne, our program director and expert in this type of history, suspects something like that may have happened because the cross was made out of a live, green tree, not a piece of dead wood.  In any case, in the church where the palisade was, there is now a sign marking the spot where the cross had been.  Personally, I thought it was a bit creepy - I can't really imagine God being on the Spaniard's side that day, and it was weird to see a description of the battle that depicted it as deserved victory for the Europeans.  Kind of like the huge lighthouse built to honor Columbus near Santo Domingo.  Interesting public history choices.

In any case, though, eventually the Taínos left and the Spaniards were able to get back into their fortress, where they prayed for protection and prepared for the next day in battle.  At this point, all of their Taíno allies had been killed or left them, so they were alone - 200 of them against thousands of Taínos.  The next morning, they woke up, expecting another ferocious day in battle, looked out across the valley...and saw grass, trees, and nothing else.  Not a single Taíno had showed up to do battle.  The Spaniards thought it was a miracle.  They celebrated their win, they prayed in thanksgiving, they eventually went back to their settlements to continue their conquest. 

Where had the Taínos gone?  Home.  The Taínos rarely did battle and, when they did, they tried to avoid a lot of bloodshed.  They'd fight until one side clearly had the upper hand, then leave it at that.  The winners would get their way in the dispute, and the next day everyone would be back home with their families, going about their normal business.  So after the Taínos had backed their enemies all the way up the hill, they figured they'd won, so they left, assuming the Spanish would pack up their things and head back from whence they came.

Of course, as neither side thought it had been defeated, it wasn't long before they started fighting again.  But that is the story of the first big battle between Europeans and American Indians, in which both parties walked away thinking they'd won.