Tropically Depressed

Tropical Depression Erika (spelled wrong in a previous post) has rained on our parade. Get it? It's a pun. Because it's a tropical depression and that means lots of rain. Oh you got it right from the beginning? Sorry. ANYWAY, so we were planning, for the second time, to go to a city called Cabarete which is in the north part of the country and is apparently a really cool beach town. However, because of the inclement weather we decided to stay in Santo Domingo for the night, and maybe go on a little adventure tomorrow. We may either go to a city called San Cristobal, which I guess has a lot of historic sites and was also where Trujillo, the ex-Dominican dictator, was born. Another option is to go to the interior of the country and see some waterfalls or cave paintings or something like that and stay the night. I'm not sure which we'll do this weekend but I guess we have plenty of time to get around to all the cool spots. It is Bridgitte's birthday next week and she wants to go to San Cristobal, so I think J.P. and I might go there for the day with her and check it out. 

School went really well today, I had a really good social studies lesson where the kids had to pretend that they were dropped down into a landscape with nothing and they had to figure out how they would survive and make a poster. It was pretty cool, we are going to finish it up on Monday. I am starting to feel very sorry for J.P though, because when things go badly for me at school I talk on and on about it, and when things go well I talk on and on about it. I guess that he'll be a teacher too before you know it (at the language institute) and then at least we can swap stories. 

Later-

Okay so I abandoned my last post to talk to J.P. and Melissa, and then Doug and Stacy came over and we wandered down the street and got a drink with them. We had a hilarious conversation about Doug's first grade class (Doug, forgive me for publishing this). Apparently the other day one of Doug's first graders had a 5 peso coin and he was showing another first grader, and the other pulled out a 10 peso coin, and another pulled out a 50 peso coin and they were all showing each other their money and being impressed. Doug thought that it was ridiculous, and knew that he should tell them to put their money away, but realized that he had about 2,500 pesos in his pocket, so he did an "Oh yeah kids, well what do you think about this" (He, of course, did not actually say that) and pulled out his money and flashed it at them. He said that after he did pretty much every kid in the class got out their money to show and he had to send them all over to their backpacks to put it away. He said that the next day there was a noticeable rise in first graders bringing money to school and showing each other, and he had to make them all put it in their lockers, and he didn't tell his assistant anything had happened the day before. Hilarious.