Adventure Part One: Santo Domingo

Me and said backpack

Last Friday, Dominicans celebrated the Día de la Altagracia (the feast day of Mary of the Highest Grace).  Last Monday, they celebrated the Día de Duarte (Duarte was one of the leaders of the Dominican independence movement).  For us students this meant a four day weekend.  So I shoved some changes of clothes, a swimsuit, and my guidebook into my backpack and set out with six of the other girls from my study abroad group on what can only be described as an adventure.  Highlights included seeing 800-year-old cave drawings, watching an iguana fight, joining the very end of a pilgrimage, riding a motorcycle, and meeting an ex-spy.  It was incredible.

Our journey began very early on Friday morning.  Our first leg of the journey was from Santiago to Santo Domingo, and our bus was supposed to leave at 7:30.  Even though one only has to be about 10 minutes early to get tickets here, my host dad passes the bus station on the way to work and offered to drive me there when he left the house at 6:10.  So I woke up before sunrise, shoved the last few odds and ends into my backpack, drank some heavily sweetened coffee, and climbed into my family's pickup truck.

It was still dark outside when I got to the Metro bus station, although there were lights all along the front of the building and a big crowd of people was leaning against the wall with their luggage at their feet.  When one of the managers showed up to unlock the doors of the ticket building, I found out why.  Apparently, the person who had been answering phones the day before had had the wrong schedule.  He'd told all of them that there was a bus leaving at 6, so some of them had arrived as early as 5 to catch a bus that didn't leave until 7 (and they were notably disgruntled about it).  As it turns out, he had given us the wrong time, too - instead of leaving at 7:30 like he'd told us, our bus didn't leave until 8.  Since it wasn't even 7 then, I found a good seat in front of the tv and hunkered down to watch a 60 Minutes-style interview about educational reform in the DR.  I share this anecdote because it more or less set the tone for our transportation throughout the weekend.  You know how you hear about buses and trains in, say, Germany or Japan that are never even a minute late, are always sparkling clean, and get you across the country in record times?  That's kind of the opposite of the buses here.

(Photo borrowed from Miranda)

Eventually, though, we got on the bus and were surprised at how nice it was.  It was like a quality tour bus: high up off of the ground, with dark blue cloth seats, air conditioning, a good amount of leg room, and even a bathroom in the back.  And for $6, it was a good deal.  So we were happy, and spent most of the time oohing and ahhing over the mountains, fruit stands, rice fields, palm trees, and used tire stores flashing past our windows. 

The room wasn't too fancy.

We arrived in Santo Domingo without problems and caught a taxi to the Hotel Ripabella.  The assistant director of our program had recommended it to us as a cheap but safe hotel not too far from the center of town.  You could tell it wasn't the classiest joint.  Except for a very large painting hanging over the front desk of a woman with an old-fashioned maroon dress and a mountain of curly brown hair (who, we supposed, was Ripabella), there were very few decorations.  There were stretches of hallways with nothing but grayish white walls and one odd, dim, completely empty room that I think was designed to be a sitting room but which no one had bothered to put so much as a lamp in.  It looked clean, though, and the man who checked us in was friendly.  He took us to our rooms, which were supposed to have three double beds between them.  When we got there, though, we found out both rooms were rather tiny and had only one bed each.  The manager said he'd bring in another bed in a minute, so we set down our bags, checked the room for bed bugs, and waited.

First, the manager and another man brought in a bed frame that seemed to be made of cheap wood with many holes in it, (most of) which were patched up with plywood....

What a sturdy frame

Then they brought in the bare mattress...

It's getting there!

Then, a maid came in, put on some sheets, and checked to be sure that the door closed.  With that second bed in there, it was a tight fit - there were two inches between this bed and the other, and the door came within one inch of it when swinging shut - but we had enough bed space at last.

Success!

With that in order, we set off to explore the sites of Santo Domingo.  Even though most of the museums we'd wanted to visit were closed and a lot of things were empty (Dominicans who  travel during national holidays prefer to visit family or head to the coast than hang out in the capital), we found a lot to do along the main roads: haggling over souvenirs, marveling about how weird it was to see other Americans, people watching, taking pictures of pretty parks.  Here are a few highlights...

The above-ground cemetery two blocks away from our hotel.  It was kind of pretty, with lots of white stones and graceful statutes of angels.  But it was also kind of creepy, as some of the tops of the graves had been broken over time and looked a little too much like places zombies would crawl out at night...


When it got too hot, we stopped at a restaurant/bar to get drinks.  Here I am, channeling the State Fair with some fried cheese and beer.  (Don't worry, Mom and Dad, it was one of only two drinks over the entire weekend!)

A very creative statue-person.  He was dressed up like a raggedy cross between a robot and an alien, but had a video game control attached to his stomach.  When this little girl picked it up and started moving the joystick around, he made a mechanical buzzing noise while moving around - turning from one side to the other, raising his arms stiffly, waving, blowing a kiss - and when she stopped, he paused.  He could have held his own among the finest statue-people of Rome.

A motorcycle used to deliver KFC!

A surprisingly delicious dinner.  Not wanting to wander around an unfamiliar city at night, we asked the hotel manager if there were any restaurants close to our hotel for dinner.  He told us to walk a block down the street and turn right, so we did so, and stopped at the first place we saw, a restaurant confusingly called "Pasta y Algo Más" ("Pasta and More") in the sign hanging from the outside and "Pasta y Basta" ("Simply Pasta") on the menu.  As soon as we stepped inside, we were worried - while it looked clean and even a little fancy, with pretty crimson table clothes and white candles on the tables, there was not a single other customer and the menu was full of typos like "wather with gas."  We crossed our fingers, hoped the food at the very least wouldn't get us sick, and ordered.  To my surprise, I ended up with one of the most delicious pasta arrabiatas I've ever had.  It was, quite honestly, better than most of the pasta I had in Italy - very flavorful and even a little spicy.  Who would have thought?

A hearty breakfast.  Here is the cook making "disordered eggs" (how the menu translated scrambled eggs).  He cracked eggs into an old mayonnaise jar, shook them up, and poured them into the same pan he used to cook all of our meals.  The resulting eggs tasted a little too much like every other meal cooked in the restaurant over the past five years, but they filled us up and came with free toast and heavily sweetened coffee.

This was moments before we left the hotel, knowing that the staff was only too happy to see us go (and, honestly, being only too happy to go).  After we'd returned from dinner the night before, we'd discovered that the bathroom in one of our rooms had started leaking and the floor was flooded.  I'd gone downstairs to help the girls who had been staying in that room complain to the night manager in Spanish and request a new room.  After almost twenty minutes of complaining and negotiating (and getting the keys to another room with another broken bathroom), we learned a valuable cultural lesson:  If something goes wrong in a hotel room in the DR, it's not the hotel's fault and, while it may be reasonable to request a new room, requesting something like the hotel washing and drying the clothes that had been soaked is being pushy (although, to my friend's relief, they did eventually agree to do that).

And, finally, our taxi to the next bus station, which for some reason was outfitted with a tiny tv.  The tv seemed to be mostly broken, but did get reception on one channel, so we were treated to the staticy sounds of a denture commercial as our taxi driver weaved in and out of early morning traffic and stopped in the middle of the road to opened his door and shout at a passing fellow driver to get directions to the bus station.




Hopefully, I'll get the chance to post the second part of this saga tomorrow, as that's when the real adventures started to happen.  Stay tuned!