iz mah birfday, i cud do wut i want

Today I'm 21. Lots of clubs to go this weekend, maybe the beach, a little Dominican rap concert perhaps? I don't feel older, but maybe I will by next week. My host family bought me a small gift and a cake, which I really appreciate [haven't opened it yet, but when I do, I'll let you know what it is]. More thoughts later, and a real post about my weekend in Cabarete with Dominican rastas and such.

La semana pasada/Cabarete pt. 1

Sorry for the delay:

Our rasta friends at our favorite bar told us a few weeks ago about DR´s first World Music Festival in between Cabarete and Sosua. We were like, yay, let´s go, this will be amazing. Not so much.

Cabarete and Sosua are in the north, about 4 hours outside of the capital. They're both really pretty towns, but very touristy. I went to Sosua with three other girls, and when we left, the weather was beautiful. About an hour into the bus ride, it starts to pour. We have to make our way up and around a bunch of mountains, and believe, that´s not fun in a bus that seems to stop every 45 minutes anyway. The whole thing took about 6 hours and at the end of it all, our hotel was crappy and damp. The only redeeming thing about the first night was our meeting up with some really cool guys who lived next door. Most of them are students in Santo Domingo and three of them are in a band together. They brought a lot of their CDs to pass out at the music festival. I got a copy and they're pretty good even though I'm not really into reggae and I hate ska.

The next morning, we moved, in the rain, of course, to a least scuzzy hotel. It was more of an apartment set up with a tiny stove and a mini fridge. We got 3 hours of good weather so we sat on the beach for a bit, but the rain chased us inside.

The music festival flew in a popular reggae band from California called Groundation and they were really good. They had a really solid groove, to the point where it's not music but more like ambient good feeling. And then it rained again, but of course Sunday was beautiful as we were leaving.

una vaina bien

Friends Natasha & Kellie with Luis on the beach>>

I know some of you have seen the photos I posted on Facebook in the album 'Una vaina bien'. Una vaina bien is a expression that translates roughly to, "that's some good shit" [sorry, Ma]. I learned that last weekend when I went to the beach and met a guy named Luis who was really friendly and told us about the area and how he'll never date another Dominican girl and bought us Brugal. Una vaina bien.

Trabajo y diviertemento

Work

Since my highly educational visit to the sugar mill, most of my time has been spent less productively. Classes have started, yes, but the students in my program have access to four different institutions, all of which start at different times. That means I only had one class last week called Methods of Social Communication (Medios de Comunicación Social) at Bonó, a school that mostly trains Dominican, Haitian, Cuban, and Puerto Rican students to be priests. I knew that going in and I walked in all dainty in my white skirt and cardigan and immediately felt super self-conscious that I was the only girl in the class. I was also the only American. Needless to say, the other students were definitely curious about me, so within five minutes of sitting down, I had three guys around me asking me questions about where I was from and what I was doing here and if I could help them with their English.

Half way through the actual class, the professor informed us that instead of looking “social communication” in general, we would be focusing on film, spending half the semester learning film history and theory and the second half actually making a movie. And being the only girl in the class, I was informed that I would need to step up as actress, most likely in a romantic role. Oh, dear. This will definitely be an interesting class.

Play

Thanks to my open schedule, I was able to have fun last week. I normally would have been in vacation, so this worked out really well. I hung out with kids from the program and learned to play Spades and dominos. I’ve actually gotten quite good at Spades. Thursday I went to a beach outside of the capital called Boca Chica. It was a beautiful beach with white sand and palm trees and small waves, though the water wasn’t that warm. Tons and tons of people kept trying to sell us stuff (lady, why would I pay you to give me a manicure on the beach?) That night was ladies’ night at a bar called Bamboo House. Wasn’t much of a ladies’ night, as we, meaning 5 girls from my program, were the only ladies there. They were playing The Police and other horrendous 80s bands, but it got better and we ended up having a good time in our small group. I’m learning to dance a little bit; bachata I more or less have down but merengue, not so much.

Saturday it was back to the beach, but this time I went to Juan Dolio. Juan Dolio’s a great beach as well, but that day was kind of windy so I had a face full of sand. There’s a town around there as well, and it’s so sad because most of the people that live th ere have fairly dark skin and they live in these tiny, cramped houses all on top of each other. For lunch, we sat a colmado and talked to the woman working there who was really friendly. We got to talking and she said she didn’t like the current administration nor does she like movies with a lot of white Americans, only black Americans like Will Smith. Both she and the guy who was sitting at the counter said that the other black girls and I looked Dominican. This guy, named Luis, became our friend for the day. He came back to the beach with us, bought us rum, and showed us how to get back. We’re thinking about going back to Juan Dolio this weekend.

I already have a favorite bar that I found during the first week, and that bar had Brazilian Night on Saturday. I ran into one of the bartenders at Baskin Robbins and he told me about it. A local capoeira group performed, the DJ played lots of really cool Brazilian music, and they served caiprinhas in assorted flavors. Passion fruit was the best.

On Sunday, the program took us to see a play called “Nuestra Señora de los Nubes”. I couldn’t really tell you what it was about, but from talking to students who weren’t as confused as I was, it’s about the immigrant experience? I’m not sure that that’s completely right, though. The play is framed in a “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” sort of way, where the characters are sort of floating outside of time and space but have a relationship to actual events. Or, I guess you could compare it to “Waiting for Godot”. Either way, inside this framework there were a lot of vignettes that I couldn’t really string together, but it was clear that they all have some greater meaning that have something to do with the human condition. Heady stuff.

Then we bought beer and sat on the Malecon (the seawall) near a strip club called Baby Dolls.

Azucar

Last Sunday [late, I know] our program took us to visit the ruins of a sugar mill from the seventeenth or eighteenth century. The ruins are actually gorgeous, even sugar plantations in the Dominican Republic had tons of slaves and were in general horrible. The slaves had to sleep in shifts because they needed slaves to turn huge wheels to extract the juice from the cane in the middle of the night. They slept in tiny rooms like this and were allowed to have sex but not marry:
This particular plantation had about 200 slaves and half of the land was devoted to growing the cane and the other half was for sugar production. Germany was one of the biggest importers of Dominican sugar.

More photos:




















NB:The "official history" of the Dominican Republic denies the existence of slavery. This particular plantation is being restored based on what the Cuban plantations of the time looked like. So now, having the confront the fact that plantations mean slaves, they explain it as being paternalistic and good for the slaves and not necessarily that rigorous. They also say that the slaves were Taino Indians, which explains the, um, darkness of the population. A lot of this happened under Trujillo, who made it one of his big projects to bleach the population. He murdered Haitians and offered Jews who were victims of the Holocaust.

La ciudad

New York is the city that never sleeps but Santo Domingo is the city that never shuts up. It´s incredibly loud, so loud that it's hard to sleep in. My house sits right on Avenida Independencia, one of the main avenues of the city so from 8 to about 9 the whole world is honking their horns outside my window. At night there's merengue and bachata coming from every where at once, and when the neighbors are screaming at the kids or the dog, I swear it's right in my room. I'm going to invest in a pair of earplugs.

El transporte

Sorry I´ve been so bad about updating. It´s hard to get to a computer sometimes.

Public transportation in Santo Domingo is insane. It's sort of a nightmare, actually. On Saturday, we went over the finer points of the transit "system":

Carro pùblicos (conchos, carros): these are a lot like cabs, except they have specific routes and you're almost always sharing them with other people, most likely people who are sitting on top of you. More often than not, they're little cars from the 90s that are more or less falling apart. You pay 15 pesos to hop on and yell, "Dèjame!" when you reach the corner nearest where you want to go.

Guaguas (voladoras): another form of transportation that's falling apart and tries to carry way too many people at once. Guaguas like buses but more in the shape of those hideous VW buses from the 60s. They spout horrible black fumes and there's a guy hanging out of the door, called a cobrador who shouts the route number and tries to collect people from the sidewalk to ride, since there aren't really any formal stops. They cost the same amount as the carros pùblicos but the routes are longer so they're a little more convenient, if more smushed. Extra seats come out of nowhere, but you almost always end up sharing a seat with someone else.

Guagua OMSA: these are the buses that the government makes available. They're shiny and new and mostly air conditioned. I forget how much it costs.

Blog Name Change

Capitalista: a person who lives in the capital (Santo Domingo)

Saludos!

Finally, a computer. This is my third full day in Santo Domingo and I´m exhausted but having a lot of fun. It´s true what they say, that trying to live your life in a language other than your native language is really tiring for the first couple of weeks.

This first week is orientation so we´re doing lots of tours, which have been really interesting. The Dominican Republic has a really cool, rich history, not least because Santo Domingo is the oldest city in the New World. We took a tour of the Zona Colonial (on Tuesday=, where all the old government buildings and old church buildings are.

Tuesday I also moved in my host family and so far, so good yay! I´ve heard horror stories and I really lucked out. I live with Doña Josefina and her two daughters, Gabby, 18 and Ligia, 20. Doña Josefina is really, really nice and this morning she gave me a glass of fresh squeezed orange juice without any pulp which meant a lot to me because 1) making fresh juice is work and 2) I hate pulp and I didn´t even have to say anything! Both the daughters are really nice, but Ligia is the most friendly. She seems genuinely interested in me. She studies psychology and her sister studies interior design. They live in a cute neighborhood, next door to a tiny pharmacy.

On my first night with them, Ligia invited me to go to the movies with her friends and we saw Madagascar 2. Here, Tuesdays and Wednesdays are really big nights for the movies because it´s only 5 pesos for a ticket (Note: There are about 35 pesos to one American dollar).

More orientation things to do but please, email me!

Word/Fact of the Day
piropo: catcall. Very, very common in the Dominican Republic and they range from harmless and a little funny to really crude. Yesterday, I was walking home with Doña Josefina and a guy asked her if he could be her son so he could be close to me. I thought it was pretty funny.

Pre-departure: Almost there

The day after tomorrow I'll be in Santo Domingo. Holy crap. Getting cold feet.


Still barely packed.