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.
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• 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. 
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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.