Last week I flew to Chicago. One of my best friends was getting married on Saturday and so on Wednesday morning I took a cab in the rain and flew through Atlanta to get to be with her, help with wedding preparations, and be there for the event. It was wonderful – that word is pretty insufficient to explain what last weekend meant to me, but when I first found out, last summer, that she would be getting married in October, I had a split second of thinking about not going, since I would be in the DR, and it would be expensive to go. And now, thinking about what it would have been like to not have gone, I can’t believe I even considered it. So wonderful doesn’t really cover it, but maybe you can understand what I mean for that word to cover.
Anyway – I want to write a post about the weekend, about what it was like to be home in the US for four days, and now what it is like to be back here, but my life here is a little tumultuous at the moment – I am thinking this week may be my last week working for this organization, and I don’t feel clear enough to write it.
So, because there’s general consensus that focusing on the positive side of things helps one to actually feel more positive about the things in question, I’m going to write you all a little free-form list about the good, surprising, enjoyable, funny, useful things about the DR, Santo Domingo, and my life here.
The Good List
- Avocadoes. Dominicans LOVE avocadoes, and I eat a slice for lunch everyday, all mixed in with my rice and beans. I have hated, for 22 years, avocadoes, and I was dismayed when I first got here and Dona Ramona put a slice of one on my plate at lunch and I realized that I was either going to have to eat it or say I didn’t like them, and I didn’t want to say I didn’t like them since pickiness in general is not a quality favoured by Dona Ramona and I was new and I wanted everyone to like me and think I wasn’t a stuck-up American princess. So. I ate it. And the first day I didn’t really like it. Or the second or third, but I think that around the fourth I started thinking about how the combination of flavours with the beans and the rice was actually pretty interesting, and now, closing on two months of eating avocadoes semi-daily, I LOVE avocadoes. I weep at the thought of all those years wasted, deprived of the buttery, green taste of avocadoes.
- Beaches. I’ve already posted some pictures on here, but no Good List of the DR would be complete without mention of the beaches. People, this is good stuff. The Caribbean is an awful place to live in lots of ways (and yes, I am listing them in my head, but I will not write them down – this is a good list!), but the beaches are GOOD. The beaches are definitely God’s way of saying sorry for the giant cockroaches and the rampant ants (I tried so hard but apparently I’m feeling pretty bitter about the bug thing – it just kept creeping in!). The beaches, with their perfectly white sand and perfectly blue, perfectly warm water, ringed by their perfectly arranged palm trees blowing in the perfect hint of a breeze, might just be enough to get Him out of the doghouse for those ants.
- Coffee. I don’t drink coffee. I don’t like coffee. Well, except for those three weeks I spent in Cuba in high school, where I learned that Cubans drank their dark, already sweet coffee in tiny cups with more sugar than coffee. Turns out the Dominicans drink it the same way. And Dona Ramona keeps a carafe full in the office kitchen, and one of my co-workers gave me a pretty brown cup. Oh coffee.
- Cold showers. I bet you’re surprised. What are cold showers doing on a List of Good? Cold showers are bad, right? Cold showers should be avoided. And, yes, while most households in the DR do not have hot water heaters, my apartment is fancy enough that it actually has one, so if I wanted to, I could switch it on 20 minutes before I wanted to take a shower and avail myself of lovely, relaxing hot water. Except it wouldn’t be. Lovely or relaxing that is. This country, friends and family, is what we call HOT. Today it is 88°F with 70% humidity. That is a recipe for making a girl discover the restorative properties of cold showers.
- Candles. Now, I always knew I loved candles, but when the power goes out for more than five hours at a time, and then the generator runs out, I find a whole new appreciation for candles.
- Dominican Rum. I don’t really feel this one needs any explanation.
- Geckos. I really love little lizards. They are so cute and they eat bugs! Two weeks ago, I had just turned on the ceiling fan and sat down on the coach to watch a little TV when all of a sudden there was a weird little “plop!” noise, and something definitely landed on my shoulder. I fought the urge to completely freak out and run around desperately trying to shake off whatever the thing was, and calmly looked down to discover it was a little gecko who must have been chilling out on the fan. I know this story should probably bar geckos from the Good Thing list, but somehow, it only makes me like them more. Plus, did I tell you? They eat bugs!
- Friends on my same wavelength. This one is not very specific to here, but since I just sent a tentative text message to a friend, asking if there was any way that I could convince her to go to the National Theatre’s production of Sleeping Beauty the Ballet with me this weekend, and she called back immediately, SUPER EXCITED, I believe I can add it.
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Bocadito
I thought I'd show you all the little gecko (? - I'm not sure how to tell between different types of small lizards) I found in my kitchen last night. There are a million little lizards everywhere, and I keep wanting to take pictures of them to show you all, but since I don't normally have my camera on me, it's been difficult. Anyway - gecko!
Thursday, October 4, 2007
So not kidding about the cockroaches, although I really wish I was.
Oh people.
I wanted to write this really excited, peppy post about my new apartment and how I was all moved in and yeay! – I really really did, I even had it all planned out in my head, and the title of post was going to be some silly mutation of a line from the Wizard of Line or that “Home on the Range” song or something (I was coming up with new ones almost daily, and let me tell you, you are sorry you’ll never get to see them, because they were great, seriously), but then…well then real life interceded.
The truth is that I’m in a not-so-good place here right now – nothing is working out well yet, and I think I had been relying on the move to transfer at least one category over into the good. Instead, as I should have expected, the move just took up a ton of time and energy and presented a whole new array of sparkling problems for me to deal with. I moved last Friday, and spent the whole weekend scrubbing every surface and killing more spiders and other creepy crawlies than you can imagine. On Monday my roommate’s boyfriend uncovered definite evidence that there were at least at one point, a serious community of rats living in the apartment and killed a number of the largest cockroaches I have ever seen. I’m talking only slightly smaller than a Maryland blue crab. No, no, really. Uh huh. And then we started noticing problems with the electricity.
It’s been raining a lot here over the past week, and Santo Domingo’s electric infrastructure is less than ideal under ideal conditions, so in a nutshell, I’ve spent the last two days waiting in the dark for the electrician and then trying to explain, in Spanish, concepts that I don’t really understand in English. (Our electrical problems seem to a generator problem, but the electricity which goes out for short periods regularly, went out in my neighborhood on Tuesday night at 8pm and just finally kicked back on about 20 minutes ago, Wednesday night at 11ish, and I could hear people outside in the street yelling “The light! The light!”)
It’s been kind of a trying time.
The good news is that the apartment is at least mostly clean, I am crossing my fingers that the electric problems are over, the leak in my bedroom is fixed, and the numbers of the spider population seem to be dwindling. Plus, I didn’t have to personally face any cockroaches, although I did have to see a couple that promise to haunt me, and I really think I can go ahead and put that in the “doing good in the DR” category. And I think I’m going to have people over tonight to watch Grey’s Anatomy (that’s right – the cable that comes included with my new apartment has the American ABC channel), so I think we’re close to moving the “Housing” item from the bad to the good category. And then, I promise, I’ll post that cheery post with the list of all the things I love about this place and some sort of visual information (I’m thinking about video, but I may be too technically challenged for that, we’ll see) so you all can what it looks like where I live.
I wanted to write this really excited, peppy post about my new apartment and how I was all moved in and yeay! – I really really did, I even had it all planned out in my head, and the title of post was going to be some silly mutation of a line from the Wizard of Line or that “Home on the Range” song or something (I was coming up with new ones almost daily, and let me tell you, you are sorry you’ll never get to see them, because they were great, seriously), but then…well then real life interceded.
The truth is that I’m in a not-so-good place here right now – nothing is working out well yet, and I think I had been relying on the move to transfer at least one category over into the good. Instead, as I should have expected, the move just took up a ton of time and energy and presented a whole new array of sparkling problems for me to deal with. I moved last Friday, and spent the whole weekend scrubbing every surface and killing more spiders and other creepy crawlies than you can imagine. On Monday my roommate’s boyfriend uncovered definite evidence that there were at least at one point, a serious community of rats living in the apartment and killed a number of the largest cockroaches I have ever seen. I’m talking only slightly smaller than a Maryland blue crab. No, no, really. Uh huh. And then we started noticing problems with the electricity.
It’s been raining a lot here over the past week, and Santo Domingo’s electric infrastructure is less than ideal under ideal conditions, so in a nutshell, I’ve spent the last two days waiting in the dark for the electrician and then trying to explain, in Spanish, concepts that I don’t really understand in English. (Our electrical problems seem to a generator problem, but the electricity which goes out for short periods regularly, went out in my neighborhood on Tuesday night at 8pm and just finally kicked back on about 20 minutes ago, Wednesday night at 11ish, and I could hear people outside in the street yelling “The light! The light!”)
It’s been kind of a trying time.
The good news is that the apartment is at least mostly clean, I am crossing my fingers that the electric problems are over, the leak in my bedroom is fixed, and the numbers of the spider population seem to be dwindling. Plus, I didn’t have to personally face any cockroaches, although I did have to see a couple that promise to haunt me, and I really think I can go ahead and put that in the “doing good in the DR” category. And I think I’m going to have people over tonight to watch Grey’s Anatomy (that’s right – the cable that comes included with my new apartment has the American ABC channel), so I think we’re close to moving the “Housing” item from the bad to the good category. And then, I promise, I’ll post that cheery post with the list of all the things I love about this place and some sort of visual information (I’m thinking about video, but I may be too technically challenged for that, we’ll see) so you all can what it looks like where I live.
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