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.