Holiday! Celebrate! Part 2.

Wow. I´ve had a wonderful 3 weeks, filled with trips and friends and a fair amount of food and beer. My second visitor, Meaghan, just left and so I spent the day doing laundry, tidying and reading on the beach. But more about Meaghan later. For now I´m going to try and pick up where I left off.

Paul and I went to Santiago from Jarabacoa, which is the next biggest city after Santo Domingo. It was not the nicest city, but it was exciting to be somewhere with a shopping area. There are so many things you can´t get in Las Terrenas, but Santiago has a load of Chinese stores with everything you could possibly want, and lots of things you don´t want at all. For a small town country girl like myself, this was amazing. But Santiago takes it a little too far with Dennys, a shop that occupies an entire block and is 4 floors of complete chaos.

Yep. This is a shop floor. (Photo: Paul Devlin)

(Photo: Paul Devlin)

Dominican mannequins have the dimensions of Kim Kardashian. (Photo: Paul Devlin)

We spent the night in a cheapo hotel and got up early to get the guagua to the 27 charcos, which are 27 connected pools. You go with a guide (and a helmet and lifejacket! How un-Dominican!) and walk, jump or slide from one to the next. They´re pretty beautiful and the water feels gorgeous, but it´s all a bit touristy. Groups are bussed in from resorts to do the charcos, and I know it´s stupid but I hate being lumped with all the other tourists! To a Dominican, I am an American tourist, no matter how Irish I am or how much Spanish I speak or how long I live and work here.

So we did the 27 Charcos  and hopped on a guagua to Las Terrenas, where I was excited to show Paul my town and my life. Unfortunately there were lots of other people excited to get to Las Terrenas. LOTS. The guagua was a 5 hour nightmare of crammed minivan with people hanging out the door and the driver constantly trying to pack more on. Of course we chatted to people and exchanged phone numbers and had a few laughs. What else can you do?

Dubh le daoine on the guagua (Photo: Paul Devlin)

The guagua was particularly bad because it was the Wednesday before Easter, where the world and its mother start to head to Las Terrenas. The town itself was mad - speakers set up on the beach, and advertising, stages and marquees everywhere. It was absolutely packed and everyone was drinking rum and dancing all day and night. It was kind of like a Carribean Funderland without the amusements. We had a ball. It was madness, and lots of fun.

Best place to get seafood - shacks on the beach right where the fishermen bring in the fish. (Photo: Paul Devlin)

Fruit truck (Photo: Paul Devlin)

Ambulance in field beside my house. Normal. (Photo: Paul Devlin)

Paul left on Easter Sunday, and had one more little Dominican adventure without me, He got on the bus to Santo Domingo, it was jam packed full of people so big boy Paul spent the journey practically sitting on top of a Dominican woman. So of course he made friends with her and her family, and went back to their house in Santo Domingo. He had a bit of time to kill before going to the airport, and spent that being shown around their barrio and eating home cooked food. He was a tired but very happy man when he left the DR.

I had Easter Sunday and Monday to do laundry and catch up on some sleep before I was off again. I go to a bar here called Lazy Dog, owned by an Englishman, Eddie and a Canadian woman. Bekka. When my house gets too mosquito-y but I have work to do, I just head over there with my laptop and hang out for a while with a coffee/cuba libre/plate of chicken wings. Eddie has another Lazy Dog in Cabarete which is a surf/kitesurf beach town on the North coast near Puerto Plata, and he invited me along to see it. My friend Nikki (who also works in Lazy Dog) came too. We had a house to ourselves, air conditioning, hot water, a double bed...I´ve never known such luxury. Eddie looked after us well and we had two days of hanging out there, enjoying all the delicious food Cabarete has to offer. Cabarete is like Las Terrenas, but sportier and more American. There´s a strip of beach bars and restaurants, and everyone speaks English. People do yoga, and there is a cafe with organic falafel burgers and the like. That kind of stuff has not reached Las Terrenas, as the foreign money seems to come from older French and Italian people, and they´re not so into wheatgrass shots and meditation.

A strange beach we stopped at on the way. It was very pretty but it absolutely stank due to a disgusting, stagnant pond. 

Cabarete beach

Nikki killing it at bottomless pancake breakfast. We had a competition, she won. Nikki - 15, Kate - 12.

I came back to Las Terrenas on the Thursday, and Meaghan arrived on the Saturday. Meaghan is one of my favourite people in the world, a beautiful lady that spreads joy wherever she goes! We met in Madrid, now she lives in Seattle. We hadn´t seen each other for over a year so it was truly wonderful to get to spend a week together and catch up. 

In one week Meaghan had a lot of Dominican experiences, starting with when she got off the bus. I was waiting at the spot I had told her to tell them to let her off at. A bus went by, but it was a small guagua and I didn´t think she´d be on that one, so I continued waiting. Eventually she turns up behind me. Turns out the driver decided to let her out at another stop, where they told her to get on a moto, with her suitcase and all. She did as she was told and they drove around asking people where Casa Paz, my house, was. Eventually she got there, and luckily my housemate was sitting in the garden. The next day we went to the arroyo, the natural swimming pool, in El Limón. We lay in the sun, played with a baby and had a few beers. After that we went to a barbeque in Nikki´s place with Nikki, her boyfriend and all her boyfriend´s friends. We danced bachata in her garden and drank rum. It was lots of fun.

Girls on guagua

Man, fully dressed, casually sitting in water.

Nikki and Betsy, her puppy.

The next morning I had to go back to work after two weeks off, which was pretty hard. But, I finish at 2:30 and spent every afternoon hanging out with Meaghan, so that was pretty sweet. Meaghan has a busy life in Seattle so was happy to chill out on the beach during the day and chill out with me in the afternoon.

Manipedi time!

 I got to take the Friday off as a personal day so we went to Cayo Levantado/Bacardi Island. We got up too late and so didn´t have as much time as we wanted there, but it was heavenly nonetheless. Last time I went was with school, so this was infinitely more relaxing than the last time.

Coco loco of course!

 

On the way home in the guagua I took this picture. Sand that looks that white against my skin has gotta be pure as snow.

On the Saturday we had a crazy night out in Las Terrenas with girlfriends where we danced loads and had one too many santo libres (rum + Sprite). The next day, Meaghan´s last, we dragged our hungover asses straight out to Playa Bonita, where we spent the day napping on sun loungers, drinking Coca Cola, eating pizza and reading. It was pure heaven. Best way to kill a hangover.

Bestie selfie

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.