Sunday, August 9, 2009

Now pretend this one is Friday

Dear Readers,

I went out of town this weekend and even though I didn't post I did not forget about you. Here is what I did on Friday:

In the morning I went to school and got a packet of information about the year. I got my schedule of classes (which is very good, all of my classes are in the morning) and a schedule of things to do over the coming weeks. I worked for awhile in my classroom and I think I have some pretty good ideas about how I want to organize things this year. I left school when I had finished the things I had to do and come home with my roommates and a member of the staff to do an inventory checklist. After we were finished Bridget went back to school for a bit to finish up and once she came home again we all piled in a taxi (Bridget, Japer, Melissa and I) and went to the bus station. We were going to a beach near Las Terrenas. We thought that was near Cabarete but apparently it isn't. We figured that out by looking at the map when we were already on the bus. Cabarete is about 2 hours from where we were going, which says a lot because it is only 4 hours to get there from Santo Domingo. We were going to stay with this guy who was a friend of Bridget's friend and had a guest house that he rented out. 

So we got to this town, following the directions of "Get off the bus when you see the sign with the picture of the cow on it. It's after the airport." So for some reason those seemed like totally normal directions to us. Well we are going through all of these one road towns on this little "public car" which is basically a minivan that 15 people sit in almost on top of each other and we see a cow sign, so we get off. We make our way up this side street which has cows on either side (real ones, not pictures) and kids playing soccer (also real). It also had a large number of Dominican people staring at us as we walked past. Literally standing there staring. We were starting to get the feeling that not many tourists came this way. We jumped several mud puddles and finally came up to this huge gate which said "Beware of Dog" in Spanish. 

We opened the gate and four gigantic dogs came running up to us and one jumped on me. I am not afraid of dogs but this one was huge and I was still thinking about the sign. The dog jumped down and starting sniffing all of our crotches docilely. I guess it was just trying to get to know us, and not kill us. The man who was a friend of a friend came out to greet us, and started telling us how one of the dogs had just bitten it's fourteenth person. I don't know what he meant for us to feel when he said this, but I settled on nervousness and wariness of the dogs. 

After my pulse had slowed to a relatively normal speed I got a chance to look around me. The house was nestled in mountains covered in jungle plants, had a two-layer pool and a distant view of the ocean. The guest house was enormous and beautiful, and also had a deck that overlooked the mountains. It was ridiculous. We paid just over $15 dollars a night to stay there, and it was one of the most beautiful places I have ever slept in my life. 

We set our things down and he drove us into town for dinner. We tried going into Las Terrenas, but the restaurant he wanted to take us to had already run out of food. This was at around 6 p.m. (?) He took us to another town close by and we got whole chickens to go. These were served with patacones (fried plantaines, which here they call tostones) and boiled plantains which Japer loved. It might have been the best chicken I have had in my life. We took it back to the house to eat and sat around and talked all night. It was a really good first day at the beach, and we hadn't even seen the beach yet.


(To be continued in Pretend this one is Saturday)

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