nawl

I never feel so alive as when I'm somewhere else, which is somewhat unfortunate given that I've only been here two months, surely not enough time for Princeton to have become the "here" from which I need to escape.

In any case, a weekend trip to the Dominican Republic, on a whim, because it was the cheapest place to fly in the Caribbean, and the Caribbean is quite a bit warmer than here.

I flew first class on the way down. This was fortunate since this fact, along with my lack of baggage, was apparently the deciding factor in their eventually letting me on the plane after I finally got to the ticket counter and a human exactly one minute after the one-hour cutoff for check-in on international flights.

I need to get a scannable passport.

First class is pretty spiffy. I could stretch my legs all the way out and not touch the bulkhead in front of me. The food was also pretty tasty. And the flight attendants were obsequiously nice.

I read a good portion of The Mind-Body Problem and identified with way too much of the first half, not always a flattering comparison.

Most of the details of the trip we trusted to serendipity. I checked a guidebook on the Caribbean out of the library (someone had already checked out the Lonely Planet Haiti/Dominican Republic) and we skimmed the skinny chapter on the Dominican Republic in the plane and decided to take a bus to the coast.

After passing through passport control, a counter offered free drinks. What a country.

From the airport we negotiated a heart-stopping taxi ride to one of the bus companies in Santiago listed in the guidebook (Did the driver quote his price in dollars or pesos? We didn't even know the exchange rate, and it wasn't posted at the airport. Ultimately we did find it out, around 30 pesos to the dollar, and deduced that we did correctly pay in dollars.), and bought bus tickets to Sosua, which appeared to be on the coast.

Everything we saw was sort of cheerfully run-down, shacks next to strip malls next to empty lots exploding with greenery next to half-built but for all appearances abandoned hotels, poles of election posters, fruit stands piled with bananas and candy next to entire zoos of rattan animals (from the bus, a rattan llama with an enormous rattan penis straddling a second rattan llama, at which the girl sitting next to me and I traded amused glances), big trucks driving along piled with men standing or sitting on whatever they were carrying in the back, a mule tied up on the green hillside right next to the road.

Most of the time I didn't quite feel comfortable whipping out my camera on the street, so I have no pictures.

Neither of us speaks any Spanish at all. I feel like I can understand a fair amount in context, particularly in writing, what with all the French and a bit of basic vocabulary from existing in California, but I couldn't produce anything if you asked me, and my inability to count higher than fifteen made me pretty useless in terms of practical communication. In contrast to everywhere I've been in Europe, people for the most part tried to speak Spanish first, and would only reluctantly switch into whatever English they knew when it was made abundantly clear that we were clueless. I always feel guilty traveling somewhere where I don't speak the language. For some reason it would be more okay if I weren't American, but here I felt like I was just confirming the monolingual idiocy of my people.

The security guards we saw all carried shotguns.

We arrived in Sosua, and were immediately besieged by dozens of men offering us taxi or scooter rides to our hotel, and with some amount of bewilderment accepted a taxi ride to the (tourist) "center". (In no case did any of the taxis we rode in have a meter. We just ended up pre-negotiating a price for our destination.)

We chose a direction to walk in, within half a block found a nice-looking hotel, went in, and arranged a room for $30 a night. The owner (who was Hungarian and used to live in Montreal--we chatted in French and I shocked her by thanking her in Hungarian) drew us a little map with directions to nearby beaches, most of which went along the lines of "Go this way, walk through the all-inclusive resort past the guard who won't stop white people and go down to the beach." She told us companies offering snorkel tours from the main beach bring tourists to an old shipwreck that was just 50 meters off a much smaller beach, so we could just swim out if we wanted.

We went off in search of dinner. The town is apparently expat central, and from the restaurants you'd think you were in eastern Europe: pasta, pizza, goulash, schnitzel, fried Camembert. Menus were in German and English, sometimes both intermixed, we found an entirely Dutch bar and a place that had a Finnish menu. Dominicans yelled out at us "My friend! Remember me?" "Let me show you..." "You lookin' for somethin? Marijuana? Cocaine?" An old man we followed back to our hotel was pursued by a prostitute who cried "Papa! Papa!"

The hotel owner told us stories. There was a fuel crisis, so the government ordered gas stations to close on weekends to decrease consumption. (If there was a fuel crisis now, you couldn't tell from the youths constantly zipping around on their scooters yelling out offers of rides for however-many pesos at tourists.) Buses would run out of gas. Police cars would run out of gas. (We saw the most beat-up 80s-era police car imaginable when our taxi stopped at a gas station, stenciled letters on the side reading "Inspector".) Eventually someone died on a weekend when there were no ambulances with enough gas to get him to the hospital. So they added some exceptions to the law.

The hotel was charming. We watched two older American men frolicking in the pool and speaking heavily accented baby Spanish with two Dominican girls (how much had they paid, I wonder).

At night I awoke to rain pounding down on the roof. The second night towards 4 or 5 am, someone knocked very quietly but very persistently on the door of the room for several minutes. I didn't answer the door, too sleepy to remember it, but when it was answered there was a girl standing there, a prostitute, and a man behind her. Is this how they solicit?

The beaches were indeed stunning.

The water was warm, bright blue, perfectly clear, and quite calm. Swimming out into the water, you could look right down to the gently rippled sandy bottom ten, twenty, thirty feet below. Three of the four beaches we found were practically deserted. From the second beach we swam along the rocks to the third, then looked out and saw diving boats clustering not so far off from the shore as expected, so we swam out and just looked down through the water at the reef and blue and yellow fish swarming around the scuba divers on the bottom.

The sun set over the beach.

We ate in an overpriced resort restaurant with a fantastic view. Both nights the electricity flickered on and off in the restaurant as we ate.

At night the moon lit up the clouds. It's impossible to take a picture.

The next morning we woke up at an ungodly hour to take the bus back to Santiago. The driver was listening to the radio, nonstop merengue at 7am. At one point outside of Puerto Plata the small towns flying by outside gave way to an *absolutely ginormous* unmarked gate and fence, followed shortly by impressively large and clean gates with the names of well-known resorts. So that's where they all are.

Once back in Santiago, ahead of schedule thanks to some generous padding, we picked a random direction and walked until we found a cafe open for breakfast. The waitress spoke no English, but the family next to us used to live in New York, so they translated for us. It was a fantastic brunch, fried eggs and cheese, plantains, avocado from a man selling them on the street, and cow foot soup, for about a tenth of the price of the tourist restaurants in Sosua.

And then it was time to fly home. The airport is completely open-air, and families plastered themselves against the upstairs windows to watch their loved ones boarding the plane.