Food. Part 1.

One of the most exciting things  for me about a new place is the food. I love it. I think about it all the time. I like buying it, I like window shopping for it so I know where things are should I ever need them. I like eating out. I like cooking. All of it.

Here, there is food everywhere. Falling off trees (passion fruit falls into our garden), being sold on the street (there is a man that walks around selling little plastics bag of steamed clams with lime and salt) and being cooked on the street in makeshift oil drum ovens.

I expect I will have plenty more to say on this topic, so I´ll just start with the fruit and vegetables today

Avocado and mango. Each cost about €0.50.

La lechosa - papaya

This aubergine, ginger, (bottom to top) orange, tomato, mango and avocado cost about €3 total. The Boots card was for size comparison!

Zapote - it´s a crazy fruit with the brown fuzzy exteriour of a kiwi, and pink flesh that tastes like COOKED SWEET POTATO. Mad.

Mandarin with green skin.

Candongo - It means custard apple in English and is chirimoya in Spain. It´s similar to the guanabana, which is soursop in English. They are fibrous and creamy with big black seeds.

Yuca - a staple here. It´s like a starchier spud.

Una frutería

I eat a ton of fruit and veg here. Every morning I have a mango with yoghurt and raw oats, it´s a cheap and wonderful breakfast. But the local diet doesn´t seem to be as fruit and veg-heavy as you might expect. The typical dish is la bandera dominicana - rice, beans and meat. It´s served here at lunchtime as the plato del día, and you decide if you want pollo (chicken), res (beef), cerdo (pork) and sometimes chiva (goat). It costs 150 pesos (€3) almost everywhere and is filling and delicious. Sometimes you get a salad too. 

Besides that, the other main staple seems to be fried chicken, or chicken roasted in oil drum ovens welded onto a stand. And, by night, you can get a delicious takeaway pork or chicken wrap with cabbage or sandwich for €2 from a street stall. Looks gross, tastes amazing.

Step 1. 

Step 2.

Step 3.

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Rain.

It rained again yesterday. Like, properly. In the month that I´ve been here, we have had two proper bouts of rain. By that I mean that it has started with crazy heavy rain and continued for several days, with breaks in between. Last time my room got soaked because of holes in the roof, that have since been repaired. This time my roof didn´t leak, but the garden flooded and all the water came into our sitting room and our bedrooms. Brown, smelly water. Luckily I was at work. Unfortunately for my lovely, heroic Spanish housemates, they weren´t. By the time I got home, the gate had been sandbagged, the water cleaned out and the floors mopped with bleach by the girls and our landlord/boss José.

José hard at work

I always wanted a pond in my garden.

Meanwhile, in school, everyone managed to keep classes going as one classroom flooded and all the outdoor spaces became water features. The school is small, not all connected by corridors and some classrooms are open to the elements so going from class to class involved getting drenched. But at least the rain wasn´t cold.

As it was Friday, I went for a lovely lunch with a colleague and to her house, smug in my Penney´s raincoat while everyone was wearing bin bags. But alas, my Penney´s raincoat was a load of shite and my phone got soaked in my pocket. Karma. So it is now sitting in rice and every now and then it starts speaking randomly. Anyway, back at Casa Paz (where I live), we are an industrious little laundry trying to clean all the dirty smelly sheets and towels used to stem the flow of shite water into our bedrooms by the wonderful Spaniards. There are piles of clothes, rugs, towels and bedsheets waiting to be washed. We are boiling water on the stove to make the manual washer a little more effective. Let´s just hope it doesn´t rain again tonight.

It´s a sunny day today and we are going to spend the afternoon at the beach and go out tonight, so all is good. There´s no point getting worked up over rain, and I was lucky only my phone got broken and not more stuff. There isn´t really any point getting worked up about anything here - so much stuff is out of your control. Life in the Carribean is a good exercise in patience and acceptance. And when things get overwhelmingly frustrating and I really need to get away from it all, I can go to a nice house of a friend or treat myself to a pizza and wine in a nice restaurant , unlike most people living here. And I have those lovely, industrious Spanish shite-water mopper-uppers, without whom this flood would have been inifintely worse for me. ¡Gracias amigas!

No spaghetti arms!

Life in Central America is as typically loud, musical and dancey as one might expect. Salsa and bachata music can be heard almost constantly, and going out at night always involves dancing. It´s like a GAA club disco all over again, waiting for a boy to ask you dance. At least there are no slow sets.

So, in an effort to try and not look like a tourist (who am I kidding?), I´ve been going to dance classes, along with my three housemates. We go to a dance studio at the end of our street and have a private class, which costs €8 each. We got an amazing deal. Apparently. But who knows? There´s no such thing as a straightforward price here. We had two teachers for the four of us the first day, and four teachers for the four of us the second day. As almost all dancing here is done in pairs, it´s totally necessary to have a teacher dance with you. If I could make mine dance with me in the nightclub all night too, I´d be thrilled. He tells you what to do and knows what you can do and leads strongly so with him I do spins and all these moves I can´t do otherwise.

Salsa is all about reading your partner´s prompts so that you can follow him, like a misogynistic sign language where the man talks and the woman only listens. As you might imagine, that is a struggle for me. I do like it though. Except when a bad dancer asks you to dance. Then it´s a painful three minutes until you can go back to your friends and tell them how crap he was. But in general it´s great, and I can´t wait until I can do this:

But bachata is what it´s really all about here. Bachata is pretty repetitive, and not helped by the fact that they listen to the same songs over and over and over again. Like, I´ll hear the same song four or five times in one day, just on the street. Bachata can be pretty boring to dance to - two steps to the right, two to the left, a few turns here and there, but that´s probably more of a reflection on me and my dance partners than the style. A lot of guys dance in a really casual, too cool for school kind of way. Like someone told them to take their grandma out for a spin on the dancefloor. Why bother asking a girl to dance if they´re gonna be that boring? Nobody´s paying them. I think.

The Dominicans are particularly crazy about this guy Romeo Santos (link in the comments because I can´t figure out html code), and every second song is by him. There are other guys too, but they all sound largely the same, earnestly singing about love, or in the case of our Romeo, about sneaking into a girl´s room and declaring her his. Those Latin romantics.

Dogs of Las Terrenas, part I.

I´ve been here almost 3 weeks now and it feels like much longer. I feel like I´m moving at a different rhythm. I walk slower. I´ve gotten used to not controlling things and not knowing how things are going to go, and it doesn´t bother me at all. Cockroaches, ants and mosquitos still bother me, but I imagine they always will.

I had the pleasure this weekend of looking after a colleague´s dog, a sweet little mutt called Toyota. Toyota is a Dominican dog, so she sleeps outside, chained in the garden and when she feels like it, she pulls out of her collar and goes for a wander on the road. With me, she got spoilt rotten, which was a reminder of why I shouldn´t have a dog here – when I leave, that dog would NOT be equipped to deal with life here with another family. It´d have to come with me, or it would miss the sofa time and the constant human attention. And I am not bringing another dog home to Ireland with me. I promised my parents.

Toyota on the beach

Poser

Most Dominican dogs just vagabond freely. The only way you know the difference between a street dog and a dog with a home, is that the ones with a home have a collar. And lots of the street dogs kind of have a home, because they hang out outside places where people give them food. What they don´t get is veterinary care, love and play.

It was a big relief to me to see that the street dogs here are largely healthy and happy. They sprawl across the footpath, sleeping in the sun. They scavenge for food in bins or get fed scraps by tourists. They´ve figured out that the best way to get food is to approach submissively, ears down and with a pitiful look on their face. The plight of street dogs here has apparently improved drastically in the last decade, thanks in no small part to an association here called Amigos de Lucky. Amigos de Lucky is a small organisation run by a German couple. Lucky was a street dog that they adopted, and when he died, they started the organisation to help other animals like him. Every year they do a spaying/neutering drive in which they bring vets from abroad and offer free spaying/neutering for pets. This year they spayed/neutered 554 animals in 8 days. They also vaccinate and neuter street dogs, and tag their ears before letting them go again. A dog here can live happily on the beach and the street, so they´re more concerned about vaccination and spaying than rehoming.

Here´s one fella tagged by Amigos de Lucky - that means he´s been vaccinated against rabies and other diseases, and that he´s been spayed.

There will be more dog photos coming. On Playa Bonita there are a load of vagrant chihuahas, which I can´t help but find amusing. One of them has patches of blue skin, and I´m not sure if he was dyed or if he has some hideous skin infection. Sometimes I get embarrassed taking dog photos - the locals stare when I whip out the iPhone and stick it in a mutt´s face. But these pooches must, and will, be recorded.