Back to La Isabela

If you remember this post a while back, then this one should look a little familiar...

There was a "co-pay" (meaning CIEE arranges transportation and we pay for food and any entrance fees) trip to La Isabela and Playa el Castillo (for us gappers, a return trip). The day was like a shot-for-shot remake of the first time just us gap year students went - the same story about Columbus and the other early settlers, the ruins of La Isabela being bullzoed into the ocean on multiple occasions, and a walk through the little museum in the park. A group shot of the (remaining) gap year and liberal arts students:

Hopefully you can still recognize me. 

Just like our first visit, we headed to Playa el Castillo after el Parque Nacional La Isabela, and this time I actually have photos to prove it! (I also opted for the fish for lunch - which was amazing and one of the best decisions I've ever made. I really cannot get enough of the food here; it's always incredible!) 

Crystal clear waters here. I didn't think places like this really existed either.

I was actually there!

And, of course, just like the first time, we headed to another beach - Playa Grande - for only an hour or so afterwards and walked around on rocks:

Me, Cricket, and Anna - one of the liberal arts students - trying to find the best place to step without crushing too many hermit crabs.

And, as expected, we all felt the same way me, Cricket, and Avy felt after our initial trip to La Isabela and the beaches - exhausted. Spending the entire day at the beach is hard work. 

Cricket and I rested up, though, and went out the following night with two other liberal arts kids, Jaime and Emery, both of whom are hilariously entertaining (and, unbeknownst to us, both of them live literally down the street). We walked down to the monument where everybody else hangs out - families, friends, couples - and walked around for a while before the boys had to get their first round of food. There are dozens of pop-up restaurants and food carts in the parking lots around the monument, so we headed there. Good and fed, we walked a few blocks away to a pool hall to meet up with a girl from another study abroad program who was friends with Jaime and afterwards headed to a bar to hang out with the manager, José, another friend of Jaime and Emery and also a student at PUCMM. Somehow several hours had passed, so another feeding was in order. Headed back to the monument and got to have my first taste of yaroa - possibly the most magnificent street food in the world. Basically, it's just plantains (or FRENCH FRIES) topped with ground beef and tomato sauce, and cheese all over the top. It's amazing. 

The following weekend we got to go on another beach trip (I'm actually learning things here too) to one of the more isolated beaches on the island, Playa Ensenada. Like all the other beaches here, Playa Ensenada was beautiful, but what was really awesome about it was that you could take a half hour boat ride out to this tiny island and snorkel in the coral reefs around it for about $10 USD. 

 On our way to snorkel!

The tiny island. I told you it was tiny.

Lynne brought her waterproof camera so she got some really cool underwater shots:

...so you get an idea of what we got to see. You can't tell from these pictures but the current and the waves that day were strong. It was actually slightly terrifying trying to swim and also snorkel for the first time. But also awesome! Happy to pay the ten bucks to do it.

Unfortunately, after feeling completely fine and healthy during my day at the beach, the rest of my Halloween weekend did not go so smoothly...got to enjoy a bout of food poisoning/stomach flu/something equally horrible Saturday and Sunday - which I'm not pretty sure I caught from one of the kids at the guardaría...but I felt completely fine by Monday. Glad the first time I was sick here only lasted for a day or so! It's no fun being sick when it's warm out.

You can expect a slew of posts over the next few days - I've got to catch before I leave for my rural week in La Piedra on Saturday! More details to come...

Charcos!

Let's start with this: www.27charcos.com

The Friday after our weekend in Constanza, we headed north for a day trip to the 27 Charcos near Puerto Plata. "Charco" translates to "puddle" or "pool" - as in the pool beneath a waterfall. So the 27 Charcos is basically a connecting group of 27 waterfalls and the "charcos" beneath them - all of which are a part of the Río Damajagua that runs through Puerto Plata.

Anyway, we brought our river shoes, got our life jackets and helmets and started our hike to the first waterfall. There are no pictures from this excursion, unfortunately - we had to do a lot of swimming along the way and no one's camera would've survived. But the pictures on their website give you a good idea. It's also hard to capture the terror you feel when standing almost thirty feet above a pool you're about to jump into to in a picture. Yes, thirty feet. (Well, I think it was more like twenty-six.) That was the highest jump we made of the day and it was pretty terrifying. And awesome. It's a weird feeling, that moment before you jump, because it feels so against your human nature to just wildly jump off of something when you know you're already safe where you are! But it was still very, very fun.

We also got to slide down some of the smaller waterfalls, which was also amazing. (Even though I hit my head on the last one...) Afterwards we headed back to the visitor's center for a fabulous buffet lunch (all the food here is incredible, all the time in case I haven't made that clear) just as it started to rain. All in all a pretty amazing day. The first of many more awesome excursions.

Unfortunately, the next week's excursion I wasn't able to go on because I was sick...This one was to another waterfall/charco, actually - Charco de los Indios.

Stolen from Cricket.

Cricket went and said it was pretty sweet - and it looks like it. There's a big reddish colored rock in the center of the photo that archaeologists believe is was remains of a face sculpted by the Taínos, the native people of Hispaniola. I wish I had more to say about this place but I just don´t know much else about it unfortunately - I missed the lecture everyone got on the way there....but I know it sure looks interesting!

It's been forever, I know.

And I'm sorry about that. So. I don't really have an excuse...I've been busy? Somewhat true.

This weekend the Liberal Arts students, me, and Cricket are going to Samaná, a town in the east on the Samaná peninsula. We'll be there the whole weekend, so hopefully on Monday I will have plenty of pictures and stories to make a blog post...

Anyway, as far as anyone reading this is concerned, I'm still in Constanza. So, day two:

A delicious buffet breakfast (of course) before we set off for the Aguas Blancas waterfall nearly an hour-and-a-half away. We drove up bumpy, bumpy roads in "safari" style, meaning in seats in the bed of a pick-up. It's hard to explain exactly...this is where taking more pictures probably would've come in handy. Here's a view from said safari truck though:

What an ugly country. (Kidding!)

I did take pictures of the waterfall that we got to though...

 You'll notice some people swimming in the pool beneath the waterfall in this one. There's a reason I wasn't - it was freezing. Literally, it was below 32 degrees.

Taken by Lynne Guitar. 

Me, Sarah, and Andrea.

We stayed at the waterfall for about an hour, had some ham&cheese sandwiches and juice boxes, felt like we were in second grade, it was awesome.

That was pretty much the highlight of that day...had lunch back at the hotel, took a nap in the afternoon, BBQ-style dinner...The next day we were all super tired but me and pretty much all of the other girls decided to go into the actual town of Constanza which was pretty uneventful and *ahem* boring. It really is just a town in the middle of nowhere - what's exciting there is all the outdoorsy activities, not the little town.

And now I'll be taking a quick homework break (which I actually have today, crazy, I know) and then I'll be back to write another post...

Since it's been almost three weeks...

This might take a while.

Part 1

The Weekend-Before-Last:
Cricket, his fake brother (host brother) Vienne, and I went to Cabarete on the north coast (about fifteen minutes away from Sosuá) and stayed in a hotel that was USD$25 a night per room. We paid in cash. Which was weird. The hotel was a ten minute walk or so away from the beach, which was awesome and also horrible because we had to walk in the sun just to go sit in the sun so we could walk back in the sun to sit in a hot hotel (but out of the sun).

Cabarete is a very strange place. It's full of tourists but the parts we saw were still very obviously Dominican. Merengue blaring from most of the bars, motoconchos always asking if you need a lift, but also a lot of white people. Lots from Spain and other Spanish-speaking countries and also a fair share of americanos. I don't think there's anything I hate more than a stereotypical American beach-vacationer. We are obnoxious; I'm sorry, World.

We didn't do much in Cabarete besides hit the beach and search for a hairbrush since I forgot one (a harder search than you'd think). On Sunday we went to this beach that was created by the earthquake in Haiti a few years ago:

That floating body is Cricket. He's alive.

And we stayed there for a few hours before heading back to the bus station to wait for our bus. All in all it was a pretty nice weekend. I'm currently in the process of trying to figure out when I can go back.

Last Thursday Avy left. For America. For good. Well, she might be back, but I really, really doubt it. We'll see her again in Spain but I'll miss her antics until then.

Anyway, this weekend Cricket and I went with the CIEE Liberal Arts program students to a mountain town called Constanza. We left at 8:00 AM Friday morning which made for a very exciting bus ride. (It wasn't.) Constanza is about three hours away from Santiago so we all got to take a very nice nap. Cricket befriended Lynne's ten-year-old grandson, Brighton (he's Dominican), when he let him play with his iPad and listen to Spanish songs with bad words in them. Brighton was a little obnoxious but in the way that most ten-year-olds can be. The other girls in the Liberal Arts program were not amused, needless to say. 

We arrived at our hotel which was surprisingly gorgeous. We all got to stay in villas which I could've stayed and lived in for the rest of the trip. 

There were glasses and plates and pots and pans and everything. It was awesome.

We also had a gorgeous view from our balcony:

We checked in and got our room keys. Boys and gals were obviously split up so I got to room with three girls from the Liberal Arts program: Stephanie, Andrea, and Sarah. They were all super nice and we got along really well which was a relief since I had pretty much no idea what any of the Liberal Arts kids were like. We had a delicious buffet lunch (the food is basically always good here) in the hotel before setting off for a hike up el Alto de los Mañangüise. The route we took was the same that the rebels and guerrillas of the 14th of June Movement took - a group of exiled Dominicans living in Cuba hoping to overthrow Trujillo - while trying to run from Trujillo's army, though their attempt to topple the dictatorship failed.

At least they had a nice view.

The hike up was muddy and dirty and full of spiders and I don't even know what else - but it was a lot of fun. Our buses were waiting for us at the top which was such a beautiful sight after hiking uphill through wet clay and cow poop for an hour and a half. But don't get me wrong - it was awesome!

Andrea, me, and Stephanie half-way through the hike. And not yet completely covered in mud!

We headed back in the buses and showered before heading out for dinner. Because Constanza has a significantly cooler climate than the rest of the DR (I wore a sweater there for the first and last time in this country), we got to enjoya meal of things we don't usually get to eat here in Santiago - sanconcho, which is basically just a hot stew (guess why we don't eat it often) and everything strawberry. Strawberry juice (amazing), strawberry cheesecake with a strawberry glaze...it was fabulous. The Liberal Arts kids take dance classes at the university, so there was some dancing after dinner which was very entertaining...

Headed back to our villahhhs and all hung out in the boys' cabin for a while, played cards and watched The Other Guys in Spanish while trying to learn a dice game (which I still don't understand). Turned in pretty early since we were all exhausted and were excited for our adventures the next day.

And now I'll start working on Part 2... 

An Update Is Coming!

I promise.

Parque Nacional La Isabela

We have a weekly Dominican History & Culture class with the resident director here in the DR, Lynne Guitar. Yesterday marked the second class, which was actually a day-trip to Parque Nacional La Isabela. La Isabela was the first town that Columbus founded in the Americas, and now all that's left there are the ruins of the structures that once stood there in 1493.

Ruins of a building in La Isabela. The boxes mark where columns would have been placed to hold the roof up.

In the 1950's, a group of German researchers wanted to visit the site of La Isabela to do some archaeological work and see what they could dig up (pun intended) about Columbus and the rest of its early settlers. This was during the time of Trujillo's rule, a dictator who ruled over the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961. He told one of his generals that Germans were coming to visit La Isabela, and told the general to "clean up" the site. The general took this to mean bulldozing everything and anything in La Isabela into the ocean, which of course was not Trujillo's intention. 

Trujillo probably bulldozed his general into the same ocean.

In 1992, in preparation for the 500th anniversary of Columbus's arrival in the Americas, the Dominican government decided to make the former site of La Isabela into a National Park , complete with a museum and gift shop. (It's not really a gift shop, just a little warehouse where people try to get you to buy their wood carvings.) They also sell freshly made juice there which is delicious (as it always is here).

So we walked around the ruins for a while, saw a graveyard where the 38 Spanish men who were left behind when Columbus sailed back to Spain (wasn't enough room on the Niña for them; it was the only ship left) were buried (well, not really, the bodies were taken back to Spain because the Spaniards didn't like the idea of burying one of their own in the "savages'" land) and saw Columbus's house:

There were walls when Columbus lived there.

After La Isabela we drove just down the road to a beach called Playa Castillo where we had fresh fish (I had chicken. Tried the fish and it was good, but it tasted like fish. And I don't like fish.), tostones, salad, and Presidente beer. I was stupid and took zero pictures, but Lynne has some on her iPhone which may find there way onto my computer at some point or another. But anyway, the beach was beautiful, swimming was like taking a bath, we got to go snorkeling and see some awesome fish in the coral reefs further off shore...all-in-all a very good day. Lynne had insisted earlier that this wasn't going to be a "beach trip" but that's basically exactly what it was. After Playa Castillo we headed down the road another fifteen minutes to Playa Grande. Playa Castillo is in a bay so there are relatively few waves and the water is incredibly warm. Playa Grande had significantly larger waves and a definite undertow, so there wasn't much swimming there. Especially after I bumped into a jellyfish - I didn't get stung! Just brushed up against the mushy top part, and apparently it was a jellyfish that doesn't sting, which I wasn't even aware existed. 

Playa Grande was the last stop before heading back to Santiago, which would take a good two hours or so. On the way back one of the tires on Lynne's car went flat and we had to stop pretty much in the middle of nowhere (and in the Dominican Republic, "middle of nowhere" means middle of nowhere) but thankfully there was a little family of farmers that came out to help us out. And of course, in true Dominican fashion, the few motorists that came along stopped and offered their help. Spare tire successfully on we continued on our way back into the city without any further incidents.

Back in Santiago Cricket and I decided we wanted to go out (it was Saturday night after all, but Avy was a tired party-pooper) so we did just that. We actually ended up running into some of the Liberal Arts students here on a CIEE study abroad program through their various universities. They've been here for over a month now, compared to our two weeks, and we were very pleased to find out that they had made some English-speaking Dominican friends. Who had cars. We ended up going out with them to some little bar-hangout place for drinks and then to a surprisingly classy dance club inside of a casino. Classier than it sounds, trust me. So nice to be around people that knew where to go and what to do around town, definitely need to hang out with them more!

On a completely unrelated note, I saw a tarantula today! And yes, I screamed. Not as loud as Avy, but it was definitely audible. We were walking through the PUCMM campus, which is basically a giant park with some buildings and a road running through it, so there are obviously a lot of...things living in it. We were walking along the road when Cricket said "What is that?" And we ran. I went back to take a look when Cricket confirmed it was dead. Can't believe there are people that keep them as pets... Moral of the story: I hope I never see one again. And if there is ever one in my house I might have to come back home, not gonna lie. Overcoming arachnophobia is a long process.  

Commenting

In case anyone would like to leave a comment (and if you want to, please do!) and doesn't speak Spanish, here are some instructions:

• At the bottom of each post there's a little link that says "x Comentarios" (usually it's 0). Click that.
• Scroll down to the bottom of the page to the comment box.
• Beneath it it says "Comentar como" (Comment as) with a drop down box next to it that says "Seleccionar perfil..." (Select profile...).
• If you have any of the following accounts: google (gmail, etc.), LiveJournal, Wordpress, Typepad, AIM (or AOL, I would assume), or OpenID, select that. By the way, google acount is cuenta de Google - the first option in the dropdown.
• Write your comment and then click "Publicar un comentario" (or "Vista previa" if you want to preview it) and you'll be redirected to the blogger homepage and asked to sign into your google, livejournal, etc. account. 
• And you've left a comment!

Of course, if you haven't got any of those accounts and would like to tell me something/get in contact with me/want to pull a prank on me/etc., you can email me at cmvaughn616@gmail.com.

The First Week of Spanish Classes

More characters, in order of appearance:

Yina - pronounced like "Gina." My Spanish teacher at ALPI. Super nice and only twenty years old.
Indira - Avy and Cricket's Spanish teacher. Also very nice and fairly young; I think she's twenty-six.
July - our instructor for our two-week teacher training course. Seems and looks much younger than he is; He regularly reminds us that he could be our father.

Experiencing my first apagone (power outage) at the moment. No fans, it's very exciting. And hot. Anyway...
After getting our phones situated at Orange, we had our first Spanish class on Monday the 5th. I'm really not a fan of the teaching method here at ALPI, but it'll have to do for the next few months. Basically, each class has a specific topic centered around a question and answer, for example:

A: ¿Cúal es la parte favorita de tu casa? (What is your favorite part of your house?)
B: Mi parte favorita es ___________. (My favorite part is _________.)

From there, the teacher holds up little pictures of rooms and you have to say or guess at what they are in Spanish. There's twenty or twenty-five notecards and with every one you go through, it's added to a list of vocabulary on the board. And that's pretty much it. You practice the vocab afterward, do little exercises, go and interview other students (Dominicans learning English) in the building using the same question and answer as you practiced in class. It doesn't sound so bad now that I'm writing about it, it's just not at all what I'm accustomed to.

During this first Spanish class, Cricket, Avy, and I were all together, but towards the end we had a little oral exam which was basically a test to see how much grammar you knew (if you could identify and use the subjunctive, future tense, por/para, etc. all fun grammar stuff). Avy and Cricket could pretty much answer none of Yina and Indira's questions while I could answer pretty much all of them. Not to toot my horn - Avy took French in high school and Cricket says he took two semesters of Spanish with a bad teacher. Anyway, that officially meant we would be separated into two classes, which was fine by me. The two of them ended up being in their own class, just them and Indira, and Yina is basically my private teacher since I'm the only one in the "class." I was a bit disappointed to find out there wouldn't be anyone else in my Spanish classes, but this is almost better. It takes off a lot of the pressure!

Our Spanish classes go from 9 to 11:30 in the morning, and our afternoon teacher training doesn't start till 2:00, so in theory we would take a concho home for lunch and then take another one back, but it's almost impossible to find a concho with three empty seats (at this point we're a little apprehensive to take them by separately) at midday when everyone else is also heading home for lunch, so we started the tradition of heading to a place called El Encanto a few blocks down from the language center. Basically it's like a Dominican Walmart with a cafeteria on the second floor (which we didn't discover for a few days) - you can buy anything there from machetes to diapers to a tea set. In other words, if what you're looking for isn't at El Encanto, you probably don't need it. Our first day there we didn't realize we could buy food upstairs so instead we bought some chips and headed across the street to Bon, the ice cream shop. Yes, my lunch was Garden Salsa flavored Sun Chips and chocolate ice cream. And it was delicious. (Although definitely not as delicious as whatever my host mom would've made, her cooking is always amazing!) We wandered back over to ALPI after "lunch" and waited for July ("Julie") to get there so we could start our teacher's training class. Eventually he arrived and we headed to the basement of ALPI (much cooler than the upper floors - there's no air conditioning anywhere in the building) where he told us about the methods we had just seen our own Spanish teachers doing a few hours before. Monday's class was only an hour rather than the usual hour and a half because July showed up late, but we were glad to be finally going home after an surprisingly exhausting day - all of us are still not used to the sun sucking the life out of us every day like this!

We attempted to take a concho home but failed miserably. Well, not miserably - we got on the right one, the A concho, it was just going the wrong direction. We ended up getting out at a place called Las Colinas Mall where Cricket and Avy ordered whole pizzas from Dominio's (no gracias) and we cooled off in the air conditioning while we figured out how we would get back home. In the end we decided that a taxi was the best option, since we had no idea where we were and were afraid to take another concho. In the end it worked out fine, but we found out we were a good twenty minutes' drive away from our apartments (or 350 pesos worth).

The rest of the week went along a bit more smoothly. We successfully took conchos to and from ALPI and discovered the cafeteria at El Encanto. We also had our first (and so far only) dance class on Tuesday. It was just Cricket, Avy, and I with Yina and Indira stumbling around the room and calling it merengue. I'm not sure when our next class is but personally I don't need it to be any time soon...

July also likes to tell us weird facts and stories about Dominican culture, like the ten rules all chauvinists in the Dominican Republic follow, including, I swear to God, "knock her up." It was interesting. July is not a chauvinist. He doesn't even wear a wedding ring because he thinks you shouldn't have to claim your spouse like that. Like most Dominicans I've met here so far, July likes to talk about his country and culture. Which is awesome, even if he does make it a little awkward occasionally.

Ok, this entry is running a little long now, I'll save the rest of this past week for tomorrow's post. Which I will actually do. ¡Hasta luego!

Our First Concho Ride

It is hard to truly understand what a concho is without having been in one, but I'll do my best to explain it. Imagine a taxi-sized car. It's most likely old and pretty beat-up, usually with a few one-inch holes (or bigger) in the floor that you can see through to the ground moving beneath you. they cost 20 pesos a ride (1 US dollar is about 38 pesos) so it's less than fifty cents on way. They have a set route, like the public buses back home, and cram as many people in as possible - usually three in the front, including the driver, and four in the back. In a concho there is always an interesting conversation - politics, relationships, anything the passengers have to gripe about or discuss. They are one of the most interesting forms of transportation I've ever used...I think I might actually miss them when I go home! Anyway, Mibra, the CIEE intern, took us around on Saturaday to show us how to the the conchos to get to ALPI where we'll be taking our Spanish and teacher training classes. We took a short tour of the school before going to Orange where we had gotten our new phones the day before - mine and Avy's couldn't text international numbers. Customer service in the DR is not what it is in the U.S. - the customer is not always right - but we couldn't get them fixed until Monday. (In fact, all we had to do was put a "+" in front of the number for it to work. It took us forty-five minutes before someone was able to tell us that.) Afterwards Mibra took us to an ice cream place called Bon which is owned by the same company as YogenFruz (a Canadian company, oddly enough) - there's a branch in Woodfield Mall actually - and she got us piña colada ice cream that was very yummy. We took another concho home for lunch and had to walk a few blocks to our apartments. By the time we got there, Avy decided that she wanted Pizza Hut from one of the malls in Santiago, but we weren´t sure which one or where it was so we had my host mom drive us there. The one she drove us to turned out to be the wrong one, but the other one, la Plaza Internacional, was only two blocks away so we walked there. Aby got her beloved Pizza Hut (pizza with corn - exactly what it sounds like) and we sat in the food court and chatted for an hour or so. We didn't really know what else to do once we finished eating, so we decided to just make our way back to our respective apartments and see if there was anything interesting along the way. (There wasn't.) I got back and watched TV with my family; Back to the Future Part III was on! My host sister got the internet to work on my computer (we have wifi here which is awesome) sometime after Marty and Doc posed for their picture in front of the new clock in the old Wild West town. And thus the facebook-ing could officially begin. The next day I discovered that my host family goes to church every Sunday, so I guess that means at least one hour a week that I'll have the apartment all to myself. Well, me and their dog Cochita. I didn't have anything planned to do with Avy and Cricket, and my host mom said that she would take me and Alejandra to the beach is Sosúa, but she was worried that the waves would be too high because there was a hurricane passing to the north of us. So in the morning I worked a little on my college apps (crazy, right?) and had tacos for lunch with my family, then sent some emails and tried to see if I could catch up on Project Runway. Unfortunately I can't watch the episodes on the Lifetime website here...but I'll find a way.

By early afternoon I was pretty bored and remember that there was a movie theater at the mall that Cricket, Avy, And I were at the day before, so I decided that we should go see a movie. It ended up being just me and Cricket that went - we tried to get a hold of Avy but we found out later that she had been at the country club all day. This was the first time Cricket and I realized that Avy is one of those "classic" people. For example: Hanging out at a country club in the Dominican Republic? Classic Avy. Ordering pizza with corn at Pizza Hut? Classic Avy. It was a revelation.

Cricket and I saw Cowboys & Aliens (or Vaqueros y Aliens here) and it was OK, mostly just a good way to waste some time. I also found out that the two of us have a lot more in common that I thought, so I'm glad we won't run out of things to talk about any time soon. We walked back home and I watched another episode of Criminal Minds with my host sister - there's a whole channel on our TV that's just American cop shows: NCIS, CSI, Criminal Minds, Law & Order. It's kind of awesome. And that was pretty much the end of the day for me. I was surprisingly tired by the end of the day after having done pretty much nothing, but I was happy to finally get a good night's sleep.

¡Bienvenidos!

Don't worry, I know this is a stupid name for a blog. If anyone has any suggestions feel free to let me know...

Anyway, I arrived safe and sound in the Dominican Republic only three days ago, but I love it already. I know enough Spanish to get by and ask for the basics (phone cards, water, where the movie theater is) but evidently not enough to converse too well with my host family yet...maybe in a few weeks. My host mom and her daughter Alejandra (my host sister) are both very patient with me and smile when I make self-deprecating jokes. I've kept a journal for the past few days but I think I'll be switching over to this since it's so much easier (and I already ran out of ink in one of my pens). So let's start out with some character introductions. In order of appearance:

Nathaniel - looks a little bit like a significantly younger, less leathery-skinned Jeffrey Donovan. His official title is Resident Coordinator for CIEE here in the DR; he met me at the airport. Very nice, good first person to meet in a foreign country.
Rafael - CIEE's favorite taxista. And hopefully soon to be mine. Apparently it's important to have a taxista con confianza - a taxi driver you can trust - because you can rely on them to pick you up and even work it out so if you don't have the money to pay them immediately, you can do so the next time you see him.
Aracelis - my host mom. Obviously I don't call her by her first name. She's very nice and makes very good food.
Alejandra - my host sister. She's 20 years old and studies architecture at the same university I'll be taking my Dominican History and Culture classes at. She also speaks fluent English but I try to forget that because she makes me feel stupid for only knowing one. But not for long!
Cricket - one of two other students here on the same gap year program as me. (There are other students with CIEE Liberal Arts.) His name is actually Christopher and he's from California.
Lynne - Resident Director of the DR program. She's a little crazy, but even crazier about the Dominican Republic and helping people. She has an adorable dog named Colby (I think) who drives around with us in her tiny Fiat.
Avi - the other gap year student. She's from Washington D.C. And black. Just so you get a good mental picture.
Mibra - the CIEE intern. She's in her early 20's and speaks almost fluent English, which is awesome. She taught us how to use the conchos (more on that later) and bought us piña colada flavored ice cream. I like her.

I didn't actually get to my host family's house until around 10 or so, and I was pretty tired. In the taxi ride over I was still really excited to finally be here where it was warm and humid, but when I got to my host's house I finally started feeling overwhelmed. Mild culture shock I suppose. I showed them the book full of pictures of Chicago that I brought for them, and mumbled my way through the Spanish language explaining to them who Sue at the Field Museum was and how big Lake Michigan is. Afterwards I decided to go to bed - I was so tired - but had a horrible time trying to fall asleep. There's no AC here, just a ceiling fan in my room that I was afraid to turn up too high because it shakes a little. There's also these birds that like to make a lot of noise at night, plus all the cars driving around honking and the people yelling...it's a very loud place. The next morning I felt a little sick and my mom gave me a grilled ham and cheese sandwich - not ideal for a queasy stomach. I felt bad about not eating all of the first meal she made for me, but I would make up for it later. ;)  Lynne picket me and Cricket up (we live in the same apartment complex) after breakfast around 8:30 to take us to the PUCMM campus where the CIEE offices are located for an orientation Powerpoint. We drove with her and Avi (who lives just two blocks away) to PUCMM and met up with Nathaniel again. We went through the powerpoint and had a delicious snack during "intermission" called tres leches, which is some kind of delicious cake. Had lunch back at our host family homes and then Lynne picked us up again for a city tour and to exchange money and buy new phones. Santiago is very colorful and very loud and there's a lot going on in the streets. I'll try to wrap this up now with some interesting things I learned my first day here:

• You can't wear shorts above your knees. Ok, well, mid-thigh is OK but pushing it. Apparently even though it's a tropical country, the people in Santiago dress more conservative and traditionally than elsewhere in the country where there are more tourists. Here only prostitutes where short-shorts. 
• Speaking of clothes, there is day-specific discoteca attire. On weekdays (yes, people go) simple jeans and a tank top and acceptable for girls. But on Fridays, girls wear tight, tight jeans, sky-high heels, and nicer blouses. And on Saturdays they break out the mini dresses and even higher heels. 
• Pedestrians do not have the right of way. A car will not slow down because someone is crossing the street, the person crossing just speeds up. And I can accurately make the generalization that no Dominican driver follows the law - people regularly drive the wrong way down one-way streets, barely stop at stop signs and red lights, unless someone's coming, and basically drive wherever they want. Surprisingly, because no one follows the rules everyone has to be extra careful and watch what they're doing, there are very few car accidents, and when there are, they're only minor fender-benders.
• You can't flush toilet paper down the toilet here. Ever. You have to throw it away and hope someone changes the garbage regularly.

And I think I'll leave it at that. This post is already plenty long.