Cabarete, pt. 2

Because Cabarete is such a touristy area [there are lots of Germans that come; the menus at a lot of the restaurants are in English, Spanish and German], you see a lot of prostitutes. It breaks my heart. When we went to Sosua for the concert, the first band we heard wasn't that great, so we found a cute little bar. There were some women sitting at tables on the sidewalk and Natalie, one of the girls that I went with, said to me, "Most of these women are prostitutes". Sure enough, within 10 minutes, one of the women from outside was pumping this American tourist full of Presidente and inviting him to cop a feel. The bar was called Bar Las Flores. Shakespeare would've appreciated the irony. It's so sad how many prostitutes there are here; after 9:00, I can't walk down the street without tripping over one. Sex tourism is big in the Dominican Republic. It's weird to think that people travel to other countries just to have sex with prostitutes, and a lot of the customers look normal, like Bill in accounting, but there are also the sleazy fat old men. I saw an enormous American man walking down the beach in Sosua with three prostitutes, none of whom could've been older than I am, and they were all fighting for his attention like little kids. I could go on about the commodification of the non-white female body but it'd just be too depressing.

I'll be volunteering with an organization that both helps sex workers stay safe and trains them for other types of work.