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.