This past weekend, my host sister Ligia, worked at the Primera Feria del Libro Usado (The First Used Book Fair) at Cinema Cafe. She was volunteering, selling books, and working with children. The Book Fair had music from local rock acts at night, too. On Sunday, I dragged a friend from the program to the Feria. A bunch of chi-chi boutiques set up booths outside the Cinema Cafe and a DJ played really cool house music. My friend and I found at that the books were gone by the time we'd gotten there but that we could go to the rock concert for the small fee of 200 pesos. I heard a remix of All This Love by Patti LaBelle, so I figured I'd stay. I met with some other friends and we said we'd shell out the money if we promised to make cool, alternative friends because that's who was there; rich kids with tattoos, piercings,and patterned Chuck Taylors. Girls with expensive purses hung on their boyfriends' tatted-up arms. Most of the crowd was fairly white-looking and a lot knew the lyrics to the songs from these supposedly small, local rock groups. The place is beautiful; it's like a shed built into a little patch of palm trees. It has couches with red cushions, candles, surfboards as decorations...my friend said if she saw a picture of this place, she'd swear she was back home in California.
I'm really lucky to find a kind of counterculture to Dominican culture. It's not all merengue and mangoes. I love my rasta bartender friends, the ska-playing guys from Cabarete. I love that I got into a carro public last week and the driver was playing Boulevard of Broken Dreams by Green Day, and that a couple days later a different driver played Lovin' You by Minnie Riperton and You're Gonna Miss My Loving by Lou Rawls. My Dominican experience has the staples, the Brugal, the Presidente, Aventura, etc. but it's been more diverse than I thought. It's when I have days like these, like at the Feria, that I love being here and can't see myself being ready to leave in May.
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